Forty Niners Forever

Well, the quarterback fight that hasn’t happened, still isn’t happening. Unless you think the pillow fight between Gabby Gabbertson and Jesus Wonder has legs. The word out of Camp Whispering York is that Colin Kaepernick has been cleared to practice as of now, and will play in the Green Bay game next Thursday.

I’d love to think that this is merely what it is. A small setback for Kaepernick as he readies for the upcoming season. Whether as starter or short-term backup. It seems like it anyway. Chip Kelly is saying as much. However, the undercurrent to all this is the underhanded gyrations of this front office. Namely whether the possibility exists that the 49ers IR him for the year to let him fester on the sidelines, a la RG III last year. The other possibility is that Kappy doesn’t bother trying, and sits anyway while he bides his time to get out of this 7th grade front office.

Frankly I don’t buy either scenario. For all the heat that Kappy catches, he’s not nearly the headache that RG III-and-out was in Washington. Kappy had a lot more success than him, and is bigger/stronger besides. But, be that as it may, Kaepernick’s only real option is to play the hand he’s got. And that’s to fight for the starting job here.

We’ve all gone back and forth over what has transpired, but the truth remains, the team bailed on him by abandoning the players they said they would keep if Kappy signed a team-friendly deal. They then blamed a poor season on him after little Jimmy H pouted his way to his dream job, half the roster bailed (with Trent Baalke holding the door wide open), and Jimmy T Farts-a-lot, and his merry band of monkeys led the team to a last place offense and defense. With and without Kappy.

My hope is that at least for now, there is a sense of hope with Kaepernick and this new coaching staff. Provided that CK can win the starting job. If not by week one, at least a couple weeks into the season.  If Chip has any sense, he will position this team to  rally around the much-maligned quarterback and at least play with some excitement. Harbaugh certainly knew how to suck the life out of any room, absorb all the fun and turn it into a glowering uncomfortable pissing match, while his antecedent merely tried to clear the room by crop-dusting his pressers with air biscuits.

UPDATE: The 49ers have signed Christian Ponder (who hasn’t thrown a pass in a couple years) to the roster to take Thad Lewis’ spot as cannon fodder.

Well, game one is in the books. Didn’t count, and there’s not a hell of a lot to glean from it, but overall, at least we looked like a football team. Contrary to popular sentiment, we didn’t trip over our dicks out there. Well, not until the 3rd/4th stringers started playing.

Overall though, the line blocked well on runs and passes, Gabby missed easy passes, Hyde, Droughns, and especially Davis, ran all over the Texans defense, Thad Lewis is out for the year. Kaepernick still hasn’t played a down and I think he passed Gabbert as the starting QB.

The DBs looked great until Osweiler left, then they didn’t look as good with the presumptive (and should be) starter Tom Savage playing (the Houstons are going to look pretty stupid when they bench the guy they just spent a fortune on).

Us? Things didn’t look as bad as they could have. I guess that’s a positive.

Anyhow, here’s the unofficial roster of your San Francisclara 49ers.

11 WRs? 6 TEs? Yeah, there will be some paring soon.

We all know that Ian Williams, whose contract was demoted from a 5 year deal to a 1 year deal due to ankle problems stemming from his broken ankle and subsequent numerous surgeries on that ankle, was placed on the non-football injury list and is thus out for the season. However, CFL phenom WR Eric Rogers was lost to an ACL tear yesterday in practice.  This sucks as he is a big target, and has the size to be an end zone threat at 6’4″, 215 lb.

A wide receiver corps that is woefully thin in experience just lost a guy with pro snaps and a solid work ethic. We are apparently looking to fill his spot in the lineup with another WR. Shit, I always liked Rhamses Barden from San Luis Obispo. He’s 6’6 for God’s sake.

The oddsmakers and naysayers are having a field day breaking down the 49ers, their tough schedule, and the fact that they are not favored in any of their games so far, uh, before anything has really happened. Take the grains of salt, or boulders if you will, but this is putting the cart about 120 yards in front of the horse. The thought process for me goes like this: We will get a fairly big bump in offensive production , say 500th place to around 15th. Something middle of the road. The defense on the other hand, should be able to play more consistently with a better coaching staff, and more depth. This of course is predicated on avoiding all the injuries that have waylaid the team these past couple years.

So ARE we a .500 team? It certainly isn’t unprecedented. Harbaugh did it. Albeit with a stocked team that Hammerin’ Highball Scotty built. We  certainly HAVE talent, and in all hopes a decent coaching staff, and turnarounds in the NFL happen every season, so it could happen. Will it? I say sure. I don;t think we are a playoff team like I thought the 2011 team was. Mainly because it was so stocked with talent. We aren’t quite there yet talent-wise, but a good season that shows the team is on the right track, and maybe a good draft next year, will assuage the creeping fears and doubts.

All this hoohaw over the schedule doesn’t take into account the fact that the NFL is parity’s bitch and year to year, teams rise and fall like the tide. I think AZ is on a downtrend. Carson Palmer was a trainwreck in the playoffs, and I think that trend follows him into this season as he’s one year older and slower. The Rams are the fucking Lambs until they actually prove they are more than their endless hype. They’ve been on the rise for 10 years now and have not reached the playoffs in the last 11 seasons.  Seattle remains the cream of the division, but even they are getting weaker defensively, and now that Beast Mode is gone, we’ll see how that affects their season.

I see the Bears, Dolphins, Bucs, and Bills as winnable. Two from the Rams, and one from AZ, and throw in the overrated Cowboys, and there’s 8. Hey, maybe lightning will strike and we take one in Seattle.

And NoFear, glad to have you back in the land of the living.

Well, the Niners have signed all their 11 picks from the 2016 draft as Joshua Garnett signed a 4 year deal about ah hour ago. Nice to do since camp starts tomorrow.

Not much else to say, but we are getting close to actual practice games. I really wonder how this QB thing works out. The hope is Kappy is laying off the weights and doing some mental gymnastics. Beyond that, there’s a lot of position battles to be won. Especially in the defensive backfield.

For those of you not prone to vomiting, here’s a starry-eyed view of the upcoming season.

http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Could-Kellys-49ers-Go-From-Worst-to-First-387470902.html

I don’t subscribe to this outcome of a winning season, bit I certainly think something around 8-8 is a possibility. The offense has to improve, due to the fact that the Blaine Gabbert era has come and gone, and the theory Colin Kaepernick plays with more confidence than these last couple seasons. It could happen. Shit, the fricking Redskins made the playoffs last year, and the usual turnover of 5-6 playoff teams will usher in some new teams.

Us? Not likely. I[m simply looking for incremental improvement. The offense and defense are both huge questions, what with the offensive line being unsettled, the WRs being a fairly untested group, and a TE corps that is middling at best.On defense, the linebacker corps is thin, what with the Aaron Lynch 4-game suspension, Ahmad Brooks’ status, Wilhoite and Harold’s inconsistency, and uncertainty in the defensive backfield, as well as the shakey special teams unit. Not a recipe for success.  Ol’ Chipper has his work cut out for him.

The big issue on defense is our pass rush. We now have book-end Ducks on the D line, and we’ll see how they get after it. Buckner should be an immediate impact guy. If not, we may have growing pains for the year. Bowman is Bowman, but he should be better with a full year of rehab and health under his belt. But the rest of the LBs are iffy.

. . . erball . . . but it was tiresome scrolling past 200 videos.!

Anyhow, keep ’em coming. Rather than talk politics or regurgitate the same shit for 3 years, I give you . . . Maggot Brain. Eddie Hazel’s masterpiece. Story was, George Clinton was tripping on acid and told Eddie to ‘imagine that you were told your mother died, but then found out it wasn’t true.’ The 10 minute solo is the result of that . . .

The football landscape has not changed, and we await the start of camp at the end of the month with nothing more or less than about 1000% uncertainty. As it stands now we have a new offense which may or may not lead to 40 punts a game, a defense that may be required to play 100 snaps on defense, a waste-of-a-5th-round-pick punter in Bradley Pinion, who ended up 27th in average, and a 41 year old field goal kicker in Phil Dawson.

All in all, a recipe for 6-10. Shitty as that sounds, that would be an improvement. I can’t even feel very much excitement for preseason games, as we all remember (tinfoil) Samurai  Mike Singletary going 4-0 in 2010 preseason games. The got him a whole lot of squadoosh. Granted, I’m curious to see how the offense works in real-time, but since we wouldn’t be playing the starters for any length of time, it will be very hard to grade these games out.

And, on a sad note, there’s the distinct possibility that one of the contributors to the madness here, NoFear49er, may have passed away in January. I don’t have any personal info for him, and I wouldn’t even know where or how to start to verify this, but Skeebers from the 49erOutsider has reason to believe he may have passed. I’m going to search the logs here and see if I can find anything, but if you folks know anything, please let me know.

Ho hum, the Bay Area loses two game 7’s in the span of 6 days. One can hope that the Giants continue to chug through the season and keep their even-year dominance intact. Johnny Cueto and Madison Bumgarner are certainly holding up their end of the deal.

Other than that, not much to report in the wide wide world of sports.