49ers Have Right Stuff : Pro football: Personnel changes, but winning attitude has kept them at or near the top for a decade.

Through a decade of change, winning has remained a constant with the San Francisco 49ers.

There has been transition in the front office, the coaching staff and at key player positions, including quarterback, halfback and the defensive secondary. The offensive and defensive lines have been revamped, rebuilt and reshuffled.

Yet, the 49ers still have won at least 10 games in 10 consecutive seasons, the only team in NFL history to do so, and they have advanced to the playoffs nine times in that span.

A year after missing the playoffs with a 10-6 record in 1991, the 49ers are back as the NFC’s top seed, with a league-best 14-2 record. They have a first-round bye this weekend and host a divisional playoff on Jan. 9, starting a postseason quest for an unprecedented fifth Super Bowl title.

How have they managed to win so consistently in such a competitive environment? The answer depends on who you ask.

“The attitude prevalent around here is playing with a sense of urgency,” tight end Jamie Williams said. “I’ve been places where at times the players and sometimes even the coaches seemed like to lose or lose noble was something good when in the end, people don’t look at that. They look at how many wins and losses you’ve got. Here, they don’t play like winning is everything. They play like winning is almost everything, and it works. You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be very, very good.”

The 49ers have also made a point of having adequate depth, a critical factor in an injury-racked sport.

Some cite a core of organizational stability and management’s willingness to commit the resources to acquire--and keep--talent when needed and to let it go when it’s not.

Others believe the team has built a winning mystique. In his 10 years as a starter, Joe Montana engineered 26 fourth-quarter comebacks and this season, Steve Young has rallied San Francisco from a tie or deficit five times in the late going.

“We don’t have a lot more talent than a lot of teams and don’t have as much talent as others,” offensive line coach Bobb McKittrick said. “We’ve been getting the short end of the draft for a decade. People say, ‘They’ve been lucky.’ But it’s happened enough times now that you say, ‘There’s something beyond luck.’ We create our luck. “

“Sometimes it’s been tough but players like Ronnie (Lott) and those guys showed us the standard and started the winning tradition. Now we’re trying to to pass it on,” center Jesse Sapolu said. “It’s just the mental approach to the game. That’s what separates us from a lot of teams.”

For all of the changes, there has been a degree of stability in key positions, starting with the owner, Edward DeBartolo Jr., who purchased the club in 1977.

The 49ers still use the offensive system installed by Bill Walsh 14 years ago and retain his policy of investing in the head coach ultimate say over the drafting of players.

“The head coach has been able to pick the people he wanted in the draft and I think that’s very important,” McKittrick said. “Probably half the teams in the NFL don’t do it that way.”

There also is a link to past success in the coaching staff.

McKittrick and defensive coordinator Bill McPherson are both holdovers from the first staff Walsh put together in 1979. George Seifert, who succeeded Walsh as coach in 1989 after six seasons as defensive coordinator, originally joined the staff in 1980 to coach the secondary.

That stability was tested severely during this past off-season, when 14 changes occurred in front office and assistant coaching positions.

The DeBartolos’ family-run real estate company, hit hard by the recessionary economy, also had to go through a restructuring to ease its debt burden and the team owner himself came under scrutiny in an alleged sexual assault investigation. No criminal charges were filed and a civil suit brought by the woman was settled by DeBartolo out of court.

None of the tumult affected team operations or filtered down to the players, for which DeBartolo deserves credit, Young said.

“He’s just been steady, in this past offseason, despite all of the kind of crazy times there were. I mean the team never felt any lack of support or lack of intensity about what our job was,” Young said.

Club vice president John McVay said when it comes to football operations, the organization puts distractions aside and concentrates on finding ways to make the team better.

“A professional sports team is a very fragile entity. It doesn’t take much to knock one of the wheels off it,” McVay said. “You have to have a tremendous ability to stay focused. We’re in the football business so we try to stay focused on that.”

The groundwork for the team’s success was laid by Walsh and the liberal mandate he was given by DeBartolo, which was essentially to do whatever it took to build a winner and he would provide the resources.

Seifert operates under pretty much the same mandate, although the 49ers are paying more attention to the bottom line as part of an effort to reduce operating costs.

“There haven’t been a lot of restrictions,” Seifert said.

San Francisco had its breakthrough season in 1981. The 49ers first got past Dallas in the NFC championship on “The Catch,” Dwight Clark’s arching end-zone grab of a pass from a backpedaling Montana. Then they used a memorable goal-line stand to hold off Cincinnati in their first Super Bowl.

San Francisco came apart in the strike-shortened 1982 season, going 3-6 and failing to win at home all year for the only time since joining the NFL in 1950. But in 1983, the 49ers regrouped to go 10-6 and have won at least 10 games every year since then, including Super Bowl victories following the 1984, ’88 and ’89 seasons. Walsh was the coach for the first three Super Bowl and Seifert took them to their fourth.

From a purely technical standpoint, McKittrick said he believes a lot of the team’s success stems from the continuity of Walsh’s offensive system, which advanced the premise of ball control through passing.

This year, the 49ers had the top-ranked offense, led the league in scoring and Young captured his second straight passing title, all under the direction of first-year offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan, who had to take a crash course on the 49ers’ system during the offseason.

“A lot of management or ownership didn’t ever recognize what a coach had, didn’t give it a chance to mature. They’d keep changing coaches every two or three years,” McKittrick said. “Here, they recognized coach Walsh had a good system and they had the good sense to maintain it.”

In building the team, the 49ers also cast a wide net in their search for talent.

“It all essentially flows from the owner, from Eddie, in giving us the financial wherewithal to get players,” McVay said. “We haven’t been a team to say the only way to build a team is through the draft or through trades or through free agency.

“We’ve used every conceivable avenue to build this team. I think that’s key. We’ve tried to blend youth in every year. We’ve made a sincere effort not to let the team grow old, because if you do it takes more than one year to turn it around.”