49ers’ Defense Plans On Tackling This Year

On the afternoon the veterans of the San Francisco 49ers reported to camp, the overriding theme was the practice schedule that Head Coach Mike Singletary greeted them with.

The most common adjectives those speaking to us ink-stained wretches used to describe it were “rough,” “brutal,” and “intense.”

The adjectives they were thinking, however, would probably not be suitable for a family web site.

The most telling example I can provide that this won’t be Club Med comes from ILB Takeo Spikes. He went on and on (albeit, with our gentle prodding) about the grueling training regimen he put himself through the past five weeks in Atlanta along with teammate Parys Haralson and other noted NFLers such as Osi Umeniyora and Hines Ward.

Spikes explained that he and the others worked out twice a day for all five weeks, and that the training involved open-hand boxing incorporated with specific football drills.

He said that this is the most prepared he’s been for a training camp his whole career.

Yet when I told him that Singletary said in his press conference the day before that he plans on the team putting on pads and hitting for both morning and afternoon practices the first two weeks, you should have seen how this proud rough-and-tumble NFL gladiator’s face dropped.

“That’s tough,” Spikes began, before cautioning that, “all that impact opens you up to injuries.”

Perhaps realizing how that sounded, Spikes backtracked a bit saying, “Don’t get me wrong, we need the work, but…”

But what?

“But you’ve got to be smart about it.”

Most of the vets expressed similar concerns, but for now, since the hitting hasn’t actually begun yet, they’re trying to have a positive attitude about it.

Or as right end Justin Smith put it, “If it won’t kill you, it’ll make you stronger…I guess.”

Of course every team has that one guy who simply won’t ever tone down the bravado, lest anyone perceive them as “soft,” and on the 49ers that guy is tight end Vernon Davis.

“In my mind I don’t think anything is rough,” Davis said of Camp Singletary.

Speaking of the mercurial Davis, he gave us a typically enigmatic answer when asked if this will be the season when he finally quits getting into training camp fights—something he’s notorious for.

“It’s behind me,” Davis assured, before quickly adding, “But I can’t stop being competitive. If my teammate across from me doesn’t like it, he’s going to have to deal with it.”

So apparently as long as whoever’s guarding Davis lets himself get pancaked on all running plays, and lets Vernon get wide open on all passing plays, there won’t be any problems.

Unless Davis drops the ball, of course.

We’ll have a chance to watch Davis and the rest of the 49ers practice for real starting this Saturday, and one treat the media will have (besides the free food) is that Singletary will have the defense go through tackling drills, which is surprisingly uncommon in the NFL.

Smith, for one, confessed that in all his years in the league he’s never done a tackling drill.

When asked what constitutes said drill, Smith replied, without missing a beat, “You tackle each other, I guess.”

Finally, from the Tell Us How You Really Feel About Us Department: Singletary was spotted walking out of the locker room on to the field and was asked if he wanted to talk to us.

“No,” he laughed and breezed right on by.

 

A Confident QB, An Unusual Workout Routine, and the Wonders of YouTube

On a day when Brett Favre drew most of the NFL headlines by simply choosing to do nothing, the arrival of the relatively nondescript quarterbacks of the San Francisco 49ers to the team’s facility in Santa Clara was greeted with little fanfare.

Yet even in their introductory dealings with the media both Shaun Hill and Alex Smith made indelible impressions that spoke volumes.

Hill, 7-3 in his ten starts for the Niners the past two seasons came in tanned, smiling, and exuding all the confidence and bravado one would associate with a starting NFL quarterback.

He spoke of how much more comfortable he was with new offensive coordinator Jimmy Raye’s playbook than he was with Mike Martz’s at this same time last year.

He expressed that he specifically liked the fact that he’ll have the option to check out of bad plays at the line of scrimmage to audible into whatever suits his fancy, and how having that freedom and responsibility will benefit his style.

Hill also said that he would prefer for head coach Mike Singletary to name the starting quarterback as soon as possible so that he could get the majority of the reps and build a report with the receivers.

His tone and body language, however, made it clear that not only does he see the competition as a trivial annoyance to be easily dealt with, but also that he is not the kind of guy who puts much stock in practice or preseason games and that he would very much prefer to get the real season underway as soon as possible.

Perhaps it could be argued that Hill acted far more arrogantly than someone with his modest accomplishments ought to, especially when engaged in a quarterback controversy with a former No. 1 overall draft pick, but Hill, with his head up, his voice clear and his glare penetrating, looked like The Man out here.

The contrast with Smith was in a word, startling.

Smith engaged the media with his head down and his voice quiet.

He made little eye contact with those who asked him questions and gave few definitive statements.

He said that his throwing shoulder, which has undergone operations the past two seasons, is feeling better than it has in a long time, but readily admitted that doubts still creep into his mind about it’s durability from time to time.

Smith stated that as far as he knew the competition between him and Hill was even but at no time did he express or even suggest that he believed he would win the job.

He was hopeful, but not confident, waiting to see what training camp and the preseason games would bring.

If you took the average Joe off the street unfamiliar with the 49ers, asked him to observe the two interview sessions and then asked him who was the former No. 1 pick and who was undrafted journeyman, there isn’t a chance he would guess that Smith was the one marked for stardom while Hill is the NFL vagabond looking for a permanent home.

Smith just wants to make a good impression in this training camp and see what happens.

Hill is already looking past the so-called “competition” and is eager for the games that matter.

One guy looks and sounds like a leader of men, the other like someone hoping to hold a clipboard and draw an easy, painless paycheck the next few years.

I would be shocked if, barring injury, that Shaun Hill isn’t the starting quarterback of the 49ers in Arizona for their regular season opener against the Cardinals on Sept. 13.

Far removed from the quarterback drama was rookie linebacker Scott McKillop, a fifth-round pick out of Pittsburgh, who despite his polite “Yes sir, no sir” answers and cheery demeanor ruined at least a dozen scribes’ afternoons when he revealed that he was too young to have ever seen Singletary’s playing days as a star linebacker for the Chicago Bears.

“I had to check him out on Youtube,” McKillop sheepishly confessed, while adding that until he visited Santa Clara for the first time in May for OTAs, he hadn’t even heard of “The Super Bowl Shuffle” that Singletary and the rest of his ’85 teammates recorded and boogied to in the aftermath of their dominant 18-1 season.

I feel so old.

Speaking of the ’85 Bears, Singletary’s Hall of Fame teammate, running back Walter Payton was known for his grueling off-season workouts running up steep hills in his native Mississippi.

Curtis Taylor, a seventh-round pick out of LSU hoping to catch on as a backup safety, may be a generation removed from the legendary Payton, but he too sees the benefit of using Mother Nature as a training partner rather than running on a treadmill in some antiseptic gym.   

“I’ve been training by running the levees back home,” Taylor said, meaning Louisiana.

When a reporter asked him if he was running over the levees or around them, an incredulous Taylor replied, “It wouldn’t do me no good to run around them.”

For most of us media types, even running around them would be a marked improvement over our current (non-existent) conditioning programs.

Odd Named No-Names Hoping to Catch On with San Francisco 49ers

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Dobson Collins.

Diyral Briggs.

Matthew Huners.

Jahi Word-Daniels.

Pannel Egboh.

In the immortal words of the construction worker from the movie Major League, “Who are these @#$%ing guys?”

Two weeks ago I wouldn’t know any of them from Adam.

Then I got hired for this job.

Collins is a wide receiver from noted NFL factory Gardner-Webb University and a two-time All-Big South Conference honoree.

Briggs is a two-time All-MAC linebacker out of Bowling Green University.

Huners; a guard at the University of Southern Florida, was named to last season’s All-Big East team.

Word-Daniels is a cornerback from Georgia Tech and Egboh a defensive end from Stanford.

What these men all have in common is that they signed with the San Francisco 49ers as undrafted free agents this past spring.

They, and other, more commonly-named hopefuls such as Mark Washington (linebacker—Texas State), Lewis Baker (defensive back—Oklahoma), and Alex Boone (tackle—Ohio State) will be among the unknown and unheralded long shots at training camp all eager and determined to show that all the scouts and the league’s talent scouts and network “Draftniks” were wrong about them.

The odds are considerably against these men making the team, even on a roster such as the Niners’ that isn’t exactly overflowing with Pro Bowlers.

Yet the league is filled with diamonds in the rough; guys who played well in college but for whatever reason weren’t drafted.

Kurt Warner, who quarterbacked the Arizona Cardinals to the Super Bowl last season and led the St. Louis Rams to two others, is perhaps the most well-known example.

Others include Dallas Cowboys star quarterback Tony Romo, New York Giants Pro Bowl center Shaun O’Hara, and Philadelphia Eagles strong safety Quintin Mikell, a second-team All-Pro in 2008.   

Collins, Briggs, Huners, et al, they’re all living the dream right now, all hoping to be next big training camp success story. They’ve got their uniforms and their playbooks, football’s version of the “chip and a chair” adage in poker tournaments.

Far be it from us on the outside, crunching the roster numbers, counting up the guys we know who played decently in the past rather than the ones we don’t who may play well in the future, to cast aspersions on these gentlemen.

Whoever will be the first man cut from the Niners, it’s a given that he is infinitely more talented on a football field than I could ever fantasize about being.

It also goes without saying that whoever turns out to be that unfortunate individual, that he would easily be able to pummel me senseless if I were to get on his bad side—except maybe Alex Romero, a placekicker out of Nicholls State.

So good luck to all of them, and as long as they’re a part of the team it will be my job to know about them and to report on them.

To know them from Adam, as it were.

Backup guard Adam Snyder, that is.

A Gimpy Brian Westbrook Won’t Discourage Pass-Happy Andy Reid

Marv Levy, the longtime coach of the Buffalo Bills, famously said once, in reply to a local scribe who asked him how he deals with strangers on the street giving him unsolicited gameplanning advice, that “If you start listening to fans, you end up sitting with them.”

Philadelphia Eagles Head Coach Andy Reid has never crossed paths on a professional level with Levy but one gets the feeling that the two of them would become fast friends, forging a meaningful relationship based on mutual admiration, film study, and cheeseburgers.

Reid, like Levy before him, has attained in his career a ratio of longevity to accomplishment that is practically unheard of in modern professional sports. For a coach to last a decade with a single team is rare.

To do so without winning a single championship and in a media cauldron such as Philadelphia no less, is unheard of and is a testament to the patience of owner Jeffrey Lurie. 

This isn’t meant to imply that Lurie is running some kind of charity. Reid certainly has been successful, and few would’ve guessed that when he was hired ten years ago as a relative no-name candidate with only “Green Bay Packers Quarterbacks Coach” on his NFL resume that he would go on to become the winningest head coach in Eagles history, both in the regular season and postseason.

There are also the five trips to the NFC Championship game, though one has to be careful with the wording when bragging about that.

Yet for all his achievements, Reid has found it difficult to win the unwavering support, much less the love, of the team’s rabid fan base. 

The primary reason for this is, of course, the aforementioned zero Super Bowl trophies earned in his tenure, just like Ray Rhodes before him, and Rich Kotite before him, and Buddy Ryan before him… well you get the idea.

However there are other factors as well, and they are entirely of Reid’s making.

There’s the fact that he has purposefully chosen to keep the media at arm’s length during his decade in charge. The next revealing press conference quote from him will be the first and he’s never seen the need to even bother pretending that he enjoys his league mandated sessions with the horde of ink-stained wretches covering his popular team.

The media, as they love to remind us, are the conduit for the fans to follow the team. In dismissing them as an annoyance and speaking to them condescendingly or patronizingly, Reid, it can be argued, is being indirectly disrespectful to the fans as well.

There’s also the matter of his against-the-grain, counterintuitive gameplanning and his many controversial roster decisions. Last season he didn’t see fit to have a fullback on the roster. A year before that he eschewed a punt returner. For most of his tenure, he didn’t see the need of having elite, or even above average, wide receivers.

For a coach who has sheepishly admitted that he would never run the ball at all if he could get away with it, that certainly seemed odd.

With all his pass plays on 3rd-and-1, his stubborn refusal to call quarterback sneaks on 4th-and-inches, and his funky 70/30 pass-to-run ratios, Reid has made a career of thumbing his nose not just at the blue collar fans but also conventional football wisdom, a phrase I assure you is not an oxymoron.    

It has been this way from the beginning with Reid. His very first decision in charge, to draft Donovan McNabb instead of the guy the fans wanted, Heisman winning running back Ricky Williams out of the University of Texas, was greeted with loud jeers.

In hindsight it was the right move, but it was also a clear signal that Reid would rather pass than run.

The Eagles under Reid have been notorious for making personnel decisions, both in the draft and in free agency, that have gone against the wishes of their fans and the wisdom of the so-called experts on ESPN and elsewhere.

Only thrice has Reid acquiesced to the fans’ pleas for common sense and all three times he has come to regret it. 

In the 2003 NFC Championship game the physical corners of the Carolina Panthers exposed James Thrash and Todd Pinkston, the Eagles much-derided starting receivers. For years Reid had defended their play and insisted the team was “fine” at the position, but after a 14-3 loss where his wideouts struggled mightily to just get off the line of scrimmage, he had to admit it was time for a change.

He gambled on the T.O. freakshow and got 14 productive, relatively incident-free games out of Terrell Owens (including a sterling performance in the team’s Super Bowl loss to the Patriots) before the receiver’s ego took over and he tore Reid’s harmonious locker room apart, essentially demonizing McNabb for having a bigger paycheck.

Owens singlehandedly destroyed the Eagles 2005 season, as he promised he would when the team didn’t give him a new contract.

The same offseason where Reid traded for Owens, he also signed defensive end Jevon Kearse in free agency to a huge contract. Kearse was a splashy name, and getting him made the fans very happy. Critics, however, feared that he was soft, injury prone, and not nearly the pass rushing force he was in his early years as a Tennessee Titan.

In four seasons the Eagles got 45 games and 22 sacks out of Kearse, a quintessential example that big money free agency signings rarely live up to the hype.

Finally, Reid kowtowed to the fans and re-signed linebacker Jeremiah Trotter in the offseason following the team’s Super Bowl appearance. It broke precedent for a team well known for sending aging veterans packing when their contracts expired.

Trotter was only 28 at the time, but already his knees were shot, and both he and Reid knew it. Coming off a Pro-Bowl season though, it would’ve been bad form to not keep him so Reid gave in. Trotter was decent in 2005, but not much of a playmaker. By 2006 he was a complete liability against the pass and too slow to reach off tackle runs. He was done.

Having learned from these experiences Reid went back to his comfort zone and has ignored both his fans and critics the past three seasons, for better or worse.

Either way, he hasn’t won the brass ring.

This summer saw Reid making many concessions to the fans. A couple of road grading tackles were signed in Jason Peters and Stacy Andrews. Leonard Weaver, an athletic, veteran fullback that can run and block, was acquired. A young running back, LeSean McCoy of Pitt, was drafted to complement Brian Westbrook.

It looks like the personnel is there to have a balanced offense.

Westbrook’s injuries (and subsequent surgeries) change everything.

Reid has shown that his arm doesn’t need to be twisted much to abandon the run. If his star runner is gimpy he will not hesitate to go back to his pass heavy ways, critics be damned.

No matter how beefy his line is, no matter how many reps McCoy gets in camp and in preseason, Reid will have the excuse that his backup is a rookie. He will have the crutch that Westbrook is always seemingly a play away from needing crutches. He’ll point to the fact that his receiving crew has never been so deep.

He’ll win or lose games the way he always has, on the right arm of McNabb.

Andy Reid might yet have to sit with the fans one day, but it won’t be because he listened to them.

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