Ethan Furman's San Francisco 49ers fan blog

Oh my God, it is going to be a long fucking season. It's the bottom of the 6th inning right now in the Giants-Dodgers game on Opening Day, and the season is already becoming tiresome for us Giants fans. Seriously, this is the team we're trotting out to start the season? This roster looks more like something we'd be stuck with if a real team was decimated by injuries. This looks like an Atlantic Coast team that should have some weird name like the Long Island Mudflaps. It's like the team the Indians had at the beginning of "Major League," when the fans were looking at the roster in the paper and asking each other "Who are these fucking guys?"

 Now it's 5-0 Dodgers. Sweet. Barry Zito picked up right where he left off last year: sucking some serious dick. I mean, is this one of the worst free agent signings of all time or what? Seven years for $126 million. People snickered at that when they thought he was still good. Now it's an absolute joke. What the hell happened to this guy? He's not a power pitcher, so he couldn't have just gotten old and lost his velocity. He throws curve balls, except instead of buckling knees like he did with the A's, now he gets hammered. To me, it's obvious: he's a mental weakling. How else do you explain coming over from the American League to the National league, to a pitcher's park, and perform so awfully? He's caving under the pressure of the contract expectations. He's lost his confidence. He can't fuck his girlfriend anymore. That's all there is to it - the man has become impotent, and if there's one thing I can't stand watching, it's a limp dick trying to do its job.

Continue reading "ENDLESS SUMMER BEGINS"

See, I told you. Good news for the Niners: Mike Nolan was brought back, and the first thing he does is oversee the hiring of a proven offensive mastermind in Mike Martz, recently let go by the Detroit Lions. Martz isn't exactly on a hot streak, leaving a team that began the season 6-2 and finished 7-9. But in his defense, 7-9 is an improvement over the 3-13 Lions of the year before. Plus, he was coaching a completely immobile Jon Kitna dealing with a terrible offensive line, and mediocre running backs in Kevin Jones and Tatum Bell. He'll have more raw talent to work with in San Francisco, as he has already made clear (check out today's article in the Chronicle).

Martz, the wizard who put together the Greatest Show on Turf a few years ago in St. Louis, said he wants to make Frank Gore the centerpiece of the offense. What a relief. See, it isn't that hard to be a coordinator, is it? Give the ball to your best player most of the time. The Niners didn't figure this out until the last few games of the season, when they started throwing the ball to Gore in the flat instead of just giving it to him to run up the middle for a yard and a half. What happened? They weren't great, but the offense improved and they won a couple games. Same thing happened in San Diego. Once Norv Turner stopped trying to be cute and just started getting the ball to LT, the Chargers stopped sucking and pulled away in the AFC West. I am deleriously happy that Martz understands this.

Continue reading "MARTZING FORWARD"

Okay, so Mike Nolan is officially remaining head coach of the San Francisco 49ers after a disappointing 5-11 season. Nolan's overall record as coach of the Niners is pretty pathetic, but this season was especially troubling because of the progress he appeared to have made last year, when we went 7-9. Expectations were definitely to get to the playoffs this year, and we took a huge step backwards instead.

So I suppose you'd expect a typical Niners fan like me to be upset. But that's not really the case. I'm more ambivalent than anything else. I don't even think Nolan is that great of a coach. He completely mishandled the Alex Smith inury with the media, selling out his quarterback to the fans and his own team, by saying his shoulder was fine when Smith said it wasn't and was clearly playing in pain. Instead of being praised for trying to be a warrior, Smith was derided as somewhat of a wimp, and the fact is that because he tried to play through it, it probably cost him the rest of the season. So that's all on Nolan.

Continue reading "THOUGHTS ON NOLAN"

Anyone see the Colts-Titans game last night? Atrocious game, infuriatingly boring to watch, except for one moment, when a Colts special teams player delivered an absolutely devastating hit on the Titans kick returner. Al Michaels and I both had the exact same reaction to the blow: a prolonged, incredulous "OHHHHHHH!!!" John Madden said it was one of the most vicious hits he'd ever seen in his life, and I have it on good information that he's seen a lot of football in his day. I was more surprised that the guy even got up after that. I would have died instantly.

As a striking screenwriter, I'm pretty in tune to what's being offered up to us Americans on the airwaves. That one play last night made me realize that the strike won't go on much longer past the Super Bowl. I think it's been tolerated by television viewers thus far because we have football to watch, which is really the ultimate reality TV. What other program offers up the type of fare like that hit, where one second I'm watching a routine kick return, the next I'm wondering if I just saw a man's life end? I mean, I TiVo'd that one play at least five times, played it back in slow motion, paused it at the moment of impact, then was lucky enough to have NBC's cracker jack broadcast team replay it another dozen times for me. No other reality show inspires me to do that. I've never once replayed New York giving a chain to some thug in slo-mo. Yup, unless contestants have to start dodging cabs speeding at them on "Survivor: Manhattan," once football is gone, people are going to start freaking out because there's no good TV, the studios will cave, and the strike will end.

Continue reading "FOOTBALL AND THE WRITERS STRIKE"

Amazing. The San Francisco 49ers won their second game in a row today. They beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a pretty good team. A playoff team. The only playoff team we've beaten all year. In fact, the only team with a winning record we've beaten all year. We were very large underdogs, I'm sure (I just spent no less than 4 minutes of research time trying to find out what the odds were for the game, but due in part to the game being over and in part to my ineffectiveness at understanding odds lines, I cannot properly provide you - i.e. nobody - with that information). But somehow, the Niners pulled it out and spoiled Jeff Garcia's glorious return to the toilet that is Candlestick Park, where he spent the prime of his career.

This is quite a nice little turn of events for us Bay Area sports fans who have been starved for some time now for any sort of victorious momentum. Now we have a chance to go to Cleveland next week and cap this weak sauce season off with a respectable 3 game winning streak and a less respectable 6-10 record. That would be a step backwards from last season, but it wouldn't be laughing stock territory, which is where we've taken up shop for the better part of the season. So, as long as the Giants are busy not making hot stove headlines, preferring to wade in the shallow end of the free agent pool with the likes of Aaron Rowand, I guess the goal of the Niners finishing 6-10 is something to root for. It's the only thing for awhile, anyway. Other than the Cowboys somehow getting bounced from the playoffs earlier that expected, that is.

Continue reading "THE SECRET"

I really hate being cold. Hate, hate, hate it. I would much rather be too hot than too cold. Being too hot can definitely suck, but I find it to be extremely uncomfortable, whereas being too cold is downright painful. It penetrates your body and gets inside your bones, freezing the marrow. There are times I've been so cold I wanted to die. I wished for death. I hate that kind of cold like I hate genital warts. I angrily curse God, demanding to know "Why me?!?"

So it's a little weird that last night I found myself freezing, but uncharacteristically happy and reminiscient. I was sitting in the upper box at Monster Park in San Francisco. My girlfriend had gotten us tickets to the Niners-Bengals game for my birthday, so we flew up for the night. I was wearing my 49ers sweater, beanie and gloves, but, having lived here in Los Angeles for ten years, I had forgotten how downright miserably cold Candlestick gets at night. And that was usually in April, when my dad would take me to Giants games in the middle of the week and I'd be the only business the chocolate malt guy would get all night. This is December.

Continue reading "A BLAST FROM THE PAST"

With the Mitchell Report being released yesterday, and the whole of Major League Baseball, from the Commissioner on down, being condemned for letting steroids run rampant in the league, we can say without argument that this is one of the worst times in the history of the game. But for one man, yesterday must have spelled relief. Big time relief. Eric Gagne-on-roids-illegally-setting-saves-records relief.

That man, ironically, is the very poster child for cheating himself: Mr. Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants.

True, Bonds's name was one of the 86 current and past ballplayers cited by Senator Mitchell as having doped up, but at this point, after already being indicted on federal charges of lying about not juicing, that didn't turn any heads. Think about how shocked we'd have been if his name

Continue reading "BAD DAY FOR BASEBALL, GOOD DAY FOR BONDS"