Sooo...

...are you getting a very familiar feeling with this game?

So THAT'S why the offense has been conservative

Once a (pretty bad) team actually had the opportunity to gameplan against Alex Smith, we see that he is, in fact, nearly the same mediocre player that we were hoping would become something better than that. Very little has changed with him, and I fear that the 49ers' may be sitting in 6-10 land waiting for Smith to not suck for longer than necessary. He has the rest of this season. If he's not awesome by the end of it, get the fuck rid of his sorry brainy-will-never-be-ready-for-primetime ass and draft someone. These are years of a franchise's life going to waste. Frank Gore's career will likely be wasted. Willis' best years are being wasted. My Sunday afternoons are being wasted.

Eric beat me to the punch, but just in case any of us (or Mike Singletary) are under any illusions, this will not be a playoff team. The Arizona Cardinals, inconsistent as they may be, are a clearly better football team who has a two game lead and a cake schedule (only games against Minnesota and Green Bay are worth mentioning). So, the division is out.

Wildcard? The 49ers are competing with the Bears, Packers, Falcons, and 2/3 of the Eagles, Cowboys, and Giants for two spots. That's assuming that the only competition involves teams with better records than 3-5 (the 49ers have the same record as the freaking Seattle Seahawks). There is no chance.

So, just eight games into the season, we already face the depressing reality that this will once again be a crappy football team that will not be "playing in January" as the kid owner put it.

The defense is good enough to not suck as it's been for a few years. Which is to say, they're just good enough to let you down week to week. The offensive line is crap. The quarterback is crap. If Singletary says anything ridiculous about the playoffs or anything else after this game, he will become Mike Nolan 2.0 in my eyes: delusional, lost on offense, and just not effective. He's already two out of three.

I'm Done*

Enjoy this dogshit team, I can't take it anymore. Plus my kid is learning too many cuss-words on Sunday afternoons.

Damn I hate this team.

Singletary hasn't done dick. This is the same exact 49ers team we've been watching for the last 6 years. I wonder if today's post-game comment will be, "we have to learn how to finish". Riiiight. Keep fooling yourself, "Sing".

It feels good to feel the burning hate for Singletary and his bullshit message. And let's be honest, anyone wearing a giant wooden cross has to be a dick.

This isn't even a 6-10 team. This is the same team that always drops 5 or 6 or 7 or 8straight games in the middle of the season. Nothing has changed!

Alex Smith crumbles under the slightest pressure. Fuck his little hands. He should
be in the UFL. You KNEW both those picks were coming.

*Yea, I'll probably be back watching on Thursday night. I obviously hate myself.

It was option B

Alex Smith is good. Vernon Davis, Frank Gore, and Micheal Crabtree are good. The O-line isn't good, but it's decent enough to win games.

The defense was amazing, and held Peyton Manning without a TD pass. Seriously.

This game was lost because the 49ers do not have professional NFL-level coaches running their team. IDK if the blame rests mostly on Singletary or Raye, but both the horrendous playcalling and unbelievable mental errors cost them this game, and both of those things rest on the coaches.

Mediocre team at best. The talent is there, but it's hamstrung by poor management.

So which is it?

To my mind, there are 3 ways this season can go from right now onward, and we'll see this Sunday how it all shall unfold:

1. Alex Smith resurrects his career and leads the team to a playoff berth.
The 49ers are the "where the hell did THEY come from???" team, and WE are finally the team that gets the endless breathless reports on how they've turned their season around and how great of a story it is to see Smith bounce back from a terrible start to his career.

Sunday's impact: A win over the Colts. If the 9ers win on Sunday, it will be because Alex Smith is the real deal. That will get everyone's attention in a right hurry.

Odds of happening: 5%. Let's be real- we're 49er fans. In the 00s, that means we get shit on and like it. No chance we end up being "that" team this year. Though I do love my boy crabs.

2. Alex Smith is merely "meh", and leads the team to another 7-9, 8-8ish type mediocre season. Everything we've seen in the last couple weeks and last couple years: sort of OK play from the defense, "meh" play from the offense, and enough stupid mental and coaching errors to just make them frustratingly close to being successful, and that keeps us coming back for more.

Sunday's impact: a close loss to the Colts. They get down fairly big (think last week), and are able to come back and make it a game, but they're never ACTUALLY in it. We've seen it many, many times before.

Odds of happening: 75%. By far the most likely outcome. I'm rooting for Smith to be sure, but forgive me if the last 4 years of watching this team have pretty much squeezed out any shred of optimism I may have had. Boy, it was fun to watch him on Sunday, but he was playing against vanilla defensive looks and not a guy I like to call "BOB SANDERS".

3. Alex Smith is an unmitigated disaster.

He plays terribly or even gets injured. The season spirals out of control and into a 5-11/6-10ish end. Plus side: we get 2 top 10 picks, thereby destroying our cap space for the near future. Wait, that's not good either.

Sunday's impact: a disastrous blowout loss on the level of the Atlanta game. There is no excuse for that to happen again, and if it does, then we know what we have on our hands- another season of bitter disappointment and disillusionment.

Odds of happening: 20%. I'm not sure I think this team is this bad, but there is definitely that chance floating around in the back of my head. I really think Smith looked excellent on Sunday, vanilla defenses or no, but there's a nagging thing in the back of my mind that makes me think we can't possibly expect anything other than disaster and blood and guts and destruction. Maybe it's the whole "I've been watching this team play football for 4 years" thing.

Houston, we have an offense.

Um, wow. I'm not really sure how to express what I just saw in words. Truly a tale of 2 teams.

In the first half it was Atlanta game part deaux- defense terrible, offense terrible, nobody could do anything. Also, Arnaz Battle needs to be cut. He does nothing that warrents keeping him on an NFL roster, and hasn't for at least 2 years now. With Crabtree, Morgan, Hill, and Jones, there is no reason for him to be here. He cannot field punts- I'm pretty sure I would do a better job than him, and I have a possibly broken thumb.

Alex Smith threw 3 touch down passes in one half. I'm going to let that sink in for a minute.

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OK? Alex Smith had 4 fewer fantasy points than TOM BRADY. In one half.

And yes, Houston didn't gameplan for Smith all week. But that was not injured Alex Smith. That wasn't "hasn't played football for 2 years" Smith that we saw in the preseason. That was a different player. Seriously. Forget the 3 TDs- they were great, but the way he LOOKED throwing them was spectacular.

He moved in the pocket. Alex Smith. Moved. In the pocket. To avoid defenders. He threw the ball on time. Alex Smith. Threw. The ball. On. Time. He fit it into tight spots. Seriously, go watch that 3rd TD to Davis. Since I started following this team, I haven't ever seen a 49ers QB make a throw like that.

Im not happy with this, though. This was a horribly coached game. It is completely unacceptable to look like this after you've had 2 weeks to prepare for an opponent- wrong packages, too many men on the field, stupid delay of game penalties, wasted timeouts, keeping Battle in as a punt returner when he has shown absolutely no proficiency in that department EVER in his career, etc.

Some of that can be attributed to the patchwork Oline and both Smith and Crabtree being on the field for the first time in a very long time. So in some respects I let it slide, but even in the first half the coaching was pretty bad.

It would have cured a lot of ills if that last drive had ended with points. Overall, I feel the less bad about this loss than I did after either of the other 2. The offense showed it's willing to make some changes once smith came in and that was refreshing. Smith looked really, REALLY good. The defense picked it up in the second half and played well.

If they can capture the way they played in the second half and bottle that up for the remaining games, they're a legit playoff team. I'm not totally sure they can, though. We'll have to see how Smith handles a defense that knows he's coming, and how the defense handles the best quarterback in the NFL. I'm expecting a 3-4 record after next week.

GO GIANTS!

Nate, you were 100% right

damn, I really thought we were gonna get to watch a good team finally. At least the first few weeks were fun, though. Back to the depressing mediocrity we know so well

WOW

IF ONLY SOMEBODY IN THE WORLD KNEW THAT IT WAS A FUCKING RETARDED FUCKING IDEA TO CUT A FUCKING PROFESSIONAL RETURN MAN FOR A DUMB SHIT WHO DOES NOTHING BUT FUMBLE FUCKING PUNTS.


HOLY SHIT I AM SO PISSED RIGHT NOW

The Difference

“I’m not going to apologize to the fans again, but the one thing that I want you to know after a game like yesterday, it’s a situation where you kind of sit back and go, ‘Wow, I didn’t really know that could happen again.’ And the thing I will say is this, this team will be a special team, this year will be a special year. It’s unfortunate as to what happened yesterday. As a staff, we did not do a good job preparing for a team (coming off) a bye week. But going forward, we will come back and we will get better and we will be a team for our fans to be proud of.”

Are those just words? Sure they are. But at this point, the only thing the coach of our team can offer us is words until they take the field again in 2 weeks. Do you know who NEVER EVER not once EVER used words like this? Mike Nolan. It's true that we were all giddy and exuberant about that moron once- I remember in the old furom days I was drawing parallels to his first couple years and Bill Walsh's for god's sake.

But if there's one thing I remember about Nolan it's that he never took responsibility for anything. After a blowout loss like this there is no way he would have had a player go up to the podium and steal 5 minutes of his spotlight to apologize for an unbelieveably moronic error. There is NO WAY he would have admitted the coaching staff wasn't properly prepared! Seriously! Can you imagine Nolan saying anything like that, even when it was BLATANTLY OBVIOUS to the rest of us?

Yes, yes, bashing Nolan again. I do it all the time. But my point isn't just to say "hahahahha Sing's better than Nolan derrrrrrrrr", but simply to say that Singletary made my faith stronger that this is truly a different team, and that this week's game was truly an aberration, not something to expect from them.

Nolan never really acknowledged that he made mistakes, so it was impossible for him to learn from them. Thus we got a rotating vortex of suck that never really improved. Sing looks to be very introspective and fully able to admit when he or the staff screwed up, he holds himself accountable just like he held Davis and Bly accountable.

Now, like has been brought up, if the team just isn't that good (a distinct possibility), then all the pep talks and responsibility-taking in the world isn't going to give them more talent. BUT, if Sunday's performance was a result of a conspiracy of problems (unprepared, overconfident, mental errors, etc), then I have faith those problems won't repeat themselves. I'm just looking forward to seeing how they respond after living with this loss for 2 weeks. I think it may be a pleasant surprise for us.

The Silver Lining

October 2nd, 1994. Week 5. A humiliating home blowout loss against a so-so team drops the 49ers to 3-2. Is this sounding familiar?

No, this team is not the same team that had Jerry Rice and Steve Young. But here's the point: the team we saw on the field today was NOT the 2009 49ers. Know how I know that? Because I've been watching them play this season. Yes, they looked flat. They looked like they looked for the past 7 years, but the difference between those years and this year is that this year, this performance is out of character for this team.

Are they going to win 10 in a row like they did in 94? Highly unlikely. The reason I bring that game up is because it shows that even an all-time great team can have a week where they just utterly fail to show up in any facet of the game.

The sting and embarrassment of what we just witnessed should not taint the rest of the season- this is not Mike Nolan's 49ers. Singletary will not allow this to happen again. Sure, I thought he wouldn't allow it in the first place, but you better believe he's going to make the changes necessary to succeed. He has earned my trust with the decisions he's made since taking the team over, and I won't let one week out of 16 completely destroy that trust. We as niner fans have been burned so many times recently that our base instinct is to think the sky is falling after a showing like this, but I'm not going to do that today.

In 2 weeks we take the field against a pretty good team, but with the added strength of a pro-bowl running back and a young, dynamic wide receiver that could stretch the field and make some plays.

I think our guys maybe bought into their own hype just a little bit too much this last week, and maybe started taking the season for granted. Well, last time Singletary coached a blowout, his team came out absolutely inspired 2 weeks afterward and came within 1 yard of blowing up the division. The sky isn't falling- our guys got humbled today, and they sure as hell won't be taking any games for granted from here on out.