When Tim Ryan joined the 49ers’ radio broadcasting crew in 2014, he became the team’s third color analyst over the span of five seasons, following Eric Davis and Gary Plummer. He’ll be sticking around for a while longer. According to a 49ers source, Ryan this week signed a multi-year extension that will keep him in the booth through the 2025 season.
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Ryan, who came to the 49ers after working as a color analyst for Fox starting in 2002, formed a great relationship with former 49ers defensive coordinator Robert Saleh. The two became so close, in fact, that the 49ers wondered if Ryan might leave to become one of Saleh’s assistant coaches with the Jets.
Ryan, a former NFL defensive tackle, has been a broadcaster for the last two decades and clearly enjoys working for the team that plays so close to where he grew up in San Jose. But Ryan attends every 49ers practice (except when the team was on its forced migration to Arizona in December) and golfs regularly with Saleh. So leaving for a new gig in New York was enough of a possibility that Ryan’s broadcast partner for the last two seasons, Greg Papa, recently joked about it when Saleh appeared on Papa’s KNBR show with John Lund.
“We were going through (Jets offensive coordinator) Mike LaFleur, and you’re taking (offensive line and run game coordinator) John Benton,” Papa said on a Wednesday phone call. “And I said, ‘I’m all right with that. But I can tell you right now, you try to take Tim Ryan from me and I’m gonna slap a tampering charge on you.’ We kind of laughed a little bit and he said, ‘No, I can’t afford Tim. That guy makes a lot of money.’ Really? How much money does he make?”
Whatever the 49ers are paying Ryan (and Papa), the team feels they’re worth it. Because 49ers director of broadcast partnerships Bob Sargent’s hope was always to create a broadcasting partnership that lasts. That was Sargent’s plan in 2019 when he replaced Ted Robinson with Papa: to form a radio crew that has the same kind of staying power and connection with the fan base as the Giants enjoy.
“It’s the perfect situation for me,” Papa said. “With the Raiders, I went year by year, which was kind of the way I wanted it (and) kind of the way they wanted it. But we kind of knew it would last for a while. But Bob, when he laid out his vision of what he wanted, he wanted it to be not a short-term situation, but a long-term one.”
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Papa was attracted to the 49ers’ play-by-play job for several reasons. Back when Mickey Luckoff was running KGO radio, he invited Papa to become the sports director when Papa was coming out of Syracuse in the mid-1980s. Papa asked Luckoff if that meant he’d get to call 49ers games. “Not quite yet,” Luckoff said.
But when Sargent approached Papa, after the Raiders let him go in 2018 and Papa was an NFL free agent that season, one of the draws for Papa was a chance to work with Ryan. Papa remembers showing up late to movies and dinner dates because he didn’t want to get out of his car and stop listening to Ryan’s NFL show on Sirius with Pat Kirwan.
Now Ryan and Papa, two football junkies who can talk schematics and formations for hours, get to watch practices together. And when they were allowed to go on the road during their first season in 2019, pre-pandemic, Papa saw that, like he does, Ryan takes copious notes and watches game film throughout flights.
“He’s the most prepared broadcaster in any sport I’ve ever worked with,” Papa said. “And I’ve worked with guys that prepared hard. But he’s a showman. He knows when the light goes on, you’ve got to be able to present the information. It’s not just being prepared. You can’t be paralyzed by the information. He knows how to dispense the information. So he’s a 10 in every category.”
The only trepidation Sargent had when hiring Papa was placing two powerful personalities together in the same booth. Not so much because they wouldn’t get along, but because both had gotten used to outsized roles compared to most play-by-play broadcasters and color analysts. Papa felt the need to give context and analysis after the tackle when he called Raiders games, and Ryan would often provide a bit of play-by-play along with his commentary when working with Robinson. It was an adjustment early on when Papa jumped to what now is the only NFL team in the Bay Area, but he was happy to step back a little.
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“At times when I’m working with other people, I feel like I have to do a little more on my part to cover up, to make sure the audience has been fully informed,” Papa said. “I don’t have to do that with him. I have to do the nuts and bolts. And with my style, I’m going to do my thing. But he’s going to fill in the cracks, and he’s going to have, without question, the most working knowledge of the football team of anybody in the market. There’s nobody else that knows as much. Nobody else has access like he does. A lot of the writers, especially the ones on your staff, (Matt) Barrows is tremendous. But Tim just has access to the team. So I’m gonna let him go and do what he does.”
There have been some bumpy times as they’ve adjusted to each other. And that doesn’t just include having to call games remotely when the 49ers were away from Levi’s Stadium, or the home games against the Dolphins and Eagles when both broadcasters had to get used to calling the games while wearing masks (which caused the lenses of Papa’s beloved binoculars to fog).
Ryan was suspended for one week last season for comments he made about Lamar Jackson’s skin tone matching the wet football during a hit on KNBR’s “Murph & Mac” show. That situation was defused fairly quickly, in large part because Richard Sherman and Dee Ford made public statements defending Ryan’s character, based on the time they’d spent with him during practices and meetings. The negative aspect of Ryan’s reputation that has stuck longer came from when he and Robinson took heavy criticism (from areas that included this column) for what many considered an excessively friendly way of treating former 49ers general manager Trent Baalke.
There’s probably plenty of blame to go around for this. Ryan and Robinson — particularly on their frequent KNBR guest segments — would take not-so-subtle knocks at people like Jim Harbaugh and Colin Kaepernick. And Baalke mostly stayed radio silent, save for his pregame shows with Robinson or Ryan, which came off almost like state-run media. The 49ers’ organizational structure and overall attitude have changed drastically in the years since Baalke’s departure, though, with team president Al Guido taking on a larger role and John Lynch serving as a liaison to the fans. The latter is something Baalke refused to do — which left Ryan and Robinson as the only spokesmen for the team other than one-and-done head coaches Jim Tomsula and Chip Kelly.
“It’s a delicate balance to walk when you’re a team broadcaster,” Papa said. “And it’s obviously easier when the team is successful. But there were things that came up during that run, the good days with Harbaugh, then the way it ended was sour. And through the coaches and the Trent Baalke situation, I was certainly aware of it, and Tim and I have talked about it in passing, but we’ve moved on. We’re on to the next chapter with Kyle (Shanahan) and John.”
Conversely, Ryan is actually quite candid when calling games. A lot of that comes from his knowledge of what the coaches are planning, so execution failures (particularly on the defensive or offensive lines) by the 49ers aren’t taken lightly. That was something one could notice while listening to the Week 5 broadcast when the 49ers hosted the Dolphins, which happened to coincide with a rare poor performance from Trent Williams.
“One thing is we both have passion for the team, obviously, and sometimes that comes across in frustration when they don’t play well. And so you hear that in his voice,” Papa said. “(Jimmy) Garoppolo’s play or (Mike) McGlinchey’s play or Trent Williams’ play or whoever’s play. Richard Sherman or it can be anybody. I don’t think he’s protecting anybody. I’ve never felt as though he was holding back and not being honest and sometimes he’s brutally honest. But the (coaches and players) know because he’s not one of those guys who says something on the air and then you never see him again. He’s there Wednesday morning for practice.”
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Ryan’s presence at practices and meetings will continue for the foreseeable future, now that he’s locked up for the next five seasons. Papa is under contract through 2023, but the 49ers also hope to extend him well past then. Though Sargent didn’t hesitate to make a move when Papa became available, or lure Ryan away from Fox when Davis had visions of doing TV in Los Angeles three seasons after replacing Plummer in 2011, he made those changes in hopes that Papa and Ryan would call 49ers games together for decades to come.
(File photo from 2019: John Hefti / Associated Press)
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