By Skip Bayless
Mercury News

In the end all that matters to most fans is performance. If Dennis Erickson coaches the 49ers to the Super Bowl, no one will care how he was hired. The lies will fade like losses.

The men who run this business are no different than CEOs of any $500 million company. They're under no obligation to disclose to reporters, and in turn customers, why they make their decisions. Double reverses are considered as clever in the boardroom as the locker room, no matter who gets burned.

But the 49ers' 27-day coaching search leaves you with one perhaps naive question: Wouldn't the organization have benefited from simply being honest?

Instead the 49ers are left dangling in their tangled web. They took a public relations beating from ex-coach Steve Mariucci and his agent. Their front-office reputation suffered to the point it looked like they might have to dip into the high school ranks for a coach willing to risk their perceived back-stabbing.

They were party to an escalating lie told by University of Washington Coach Rick Neuheisel that could damage his future in college coaching. They didn't ask for permission to make an offer to a coach under contract, Erickson, and he accepted less than a week after promising some recruits he would retire at Oregon State.

The 49ers left odor, doubt and clumsy footprints beneath windowsills across pro and college football. Now, you can't help wondering if they genuinely considered a minority candidate or if Mariucci wasn't merely grinding an ax when he suggested he was set up and undermined by General Manager Terry Donahue and adviser Bill Walsh. Were all those big front-office smiles at Wednesday's Erickson extravaganza forced or chillingly delusional?

At least the Raiders are upfront about sneaking around.

When 49ers team director John York fired Mariucci, why didn't he tell the media exactly why? Why couldn't he have acknowledged the obvious, that it had at least partly to do with Mariucci's shortcomings as a coach? That would have won York more respect around the league. Yet he allowed the following week to degenerate into he-said, he-said mudslinging about how Mariucci was angling for more power and Mariucci convincingly responding that was silly.

This led to three quick rejections that shocked the 49ers but shouldn't have. Three coordinators -- Monte Kiffin, Jim Johnson and Brad Childress -- clearly wanted no part of the House of York and stayed put for big raises. If any of the three had said yes, York would have had a difficult time conducting a credible minority search.

This led to a very public Phase 2, with three defensive coordinators paraded before the media. Two were black, Ted Cottrell and Greg Blache. One was 49ers coordinator Jim Mora.

Donahue and Cottrell's agent, Joe Linta, wound up exchanging fire via ESPN over what happened next. Donahue was head coach at UCLA, but Linta was an assistant at Yale. So Linta knows the NCAA ropes.

Linta said: ``I simply couldn't understand why Donahue had to parade these three guys before the media for a dog and pony while he was sneaking around interviewing college coaches. This has nothing to do with the minority issue. I still believe York would have been completely fine with Ted, but that Donahue wasn't comfortable because he didn't know Ted.''

Donahue's response: ``No college coach can be exposed to the media when he currently has a team. It isn't the right thing to do for the coach or for us. An NFL assistant doesn't have a team, a community, a university that he's responsible for.''

Linta: ``Come on, this isn't about curing AIDS. This is about hiring a man to coach a team in the entertainment business. Who at the University of Washington is going to think it's so wrong for Neuheisel to at least consider a job that might pay him $3 million instead of $1.5 million?''

Exactly. Despite his reputation for job seeking, who could have blamed Neuheisel for discussing the 49ers job with the man he played and coached for at UCLA? Most people would have been surprised if he hadn't. After a 7-6 season, wouldn't Neuheisel's stock rise a little if Huskies fans know the San Francisco 49ers considered him? Why not publicly acknowledge the obvious?

Instead Neuheisel issued an angry written denial Monday, saying he had been on a family vacation and hadn't been contacted by the 49ers. An angry Linta was telling reporters the same day that Neuheisel had been meeting with 49ers brass on the sly at a Santa Clara hotel. After changing his story several times -- we were almost up to aliens took him to the Bay Area -- Neuheisel finally admitted he lied to protect a ``confidentiality agreement.''

You wonder if its intent was to protect Neuheisel's reputation or the 49ers'. They appeared to be down to Candidate No. 26.

``Neuheisel's situation was Nixonian,'' Linta said. ``The cover-up was worse than the lie. Why did Donahue have to be accomplice to it? Why couldn't he have approached his college coaches two weeks before signing date? This way, he was endorsing the deception of the kids.''

This stinks worst of all: Even if Oregon State lets a recruit out of his agreement, he still has to sit out a year before playing at a Division I school. Several recruits say Erickson told them his wife would leave him if he doesn't retire as the Beavers' coach.

Sounds like he fits right in with his new bosses.

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