I posted this in the 49er season thread but really it belongs here. This was written before the news of Raye's firing broke.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Mike Singletary takes pride in being a blunt guy, in being a truth-teller. Now, he needs to hear the truth.

Hear this, Mike. Fire offensive coordinator Jimmy Raye, fire him after that pitiful showing here on Sunday. Fire him even though you said after the game he will be your offensive coordinator all season. Just fire him. If you don’t, then re-assign him to a subordinate position. Make him second banana to someone who knows offense.

Does that sound harsh? Well, that’s too bad. You live in a harsh world, a win-or-lose world and now you are 0-3 and after next week in Atlanta, you will be 0-4. Count on it. There’s a good chance you’ll go 0-5. You need a new offensive coordinator and you need him fast.

The pity of it, Mike, is you have more offensive talent than Kansas City. Anyone can see that. Vernon Davis is a mismatch against every defensive player he encounters. But Raye doesn’t know how to use him or any of your players. He’s color-blind in a Technicolor world. Replace him while you still have a job.

Compare his work to the combination of the Chiefs’ Todd Haley and Charlie Weis.

Their team has limited talent. But they use what they have, use it with imagination and flare. Their game plan was a pleasure to watch, like that double-flea-flicker watchamacallit they used, the ball going back to quarterback Matt Cassell and Cassell throwing a 45-yard touchdown pass to Dwayne Bowe.

Raye never would call a play like that. All he understands is Frank Gore up the middle about a million times mixed with a few screen passes. That dull play calling passes for daring with him. He lacks the nerve the Chiefs demonstrated every minute of the game.

Face it, Mike, the Chiefs took it to you all day. They were the aggressors. For all your big words and your tough-guy posturing, you absorbed whatever they gave you, just accepted it. You never once dictated the agenda or dominated the fight or were even in the fight. The Chiefs beat you up.

I admit I’m coming down hard on Raye’s ability. But he’s not the biggest problem.

This you need to understand. You are the big problem. I mean nothing personal by this. I like you as a man, but as a head coach you are lacking. I must say that.

I don’t believe you know the first thing about offensive football. If you did, you never could have accepted Raye on your staff. Your main offensive philosophy is “balance.” That translates as stodgy and predictable. You are decades behind the times and don’t even know it. That’s why Scott Linehan, a fine offensive coordinator, did not choose to work with you. He went to Detroit of all places. He rejected you and the Niners because he saw where this was headed.

You are a “will” coach. You have a strong will and you try to jam your will into your players’ hearts, make them Junior Singletaries. It doesn’t work that way.

Football is not a will sport or a bludgeoning sport. It is a precision sport and you don’t know the precise dimensions of football.

Take what happened immediately after the Chiefs game. You strode into the interview room and admitted your team played like junk. That was to be expected.

You are not, after all, a crazy person. When the media asked what went wrong, you said, “I don’t know. It could be a number of things.” You actually said, “I don’t know.”

Do you think after the wheels came off the wagon Bill Walsh would have said, “I don’t know?” He could have recited his offense’s problems chapter and verse, and he never would have trusted his offense to Raye.

One reporter asked if you were you out-coached.

“I would not say we were out-coached,” you replied. “In a loss like this a lot of things look wrong.”

Mike, you were out-coached. It was worse than that. You got embarrassed out there. You and Raye were taken to school by professionals who know their business. If Haley coached your team with all its talent and if you coached the Chiefs, he would have beaten you 55-7.

I don’t mean to be unkind with you, but you would be frank with a linebacker who failed to make a play. You don’t know what’s wrong with your team, don’t possess the knowledge to assess what’s wrong.

You are a head coach who does not know how to be a head coach - you are living in a stage play and in this play you’ve been given the role of head coach. You certainly look the part and have a good speaking voice. But in the NFL, a savvy owner would not hire you. The savvy owner would hire Bill Belichick even though he doesn’t look like a head coach . He looks like he just crawled out of the hamper. It’s just that Belichick really knows how to coach and I’m afraid you don’t.

After the game, you said other stuff that amazes me. Asked if the problem with the offense is philosophy or execution, you said, “I think it’s execution. It’s just one of those things. A coach can call a play. The bottom line is you’ve got to execute.”

I don’t trust your answer. I don’t think you’d know a bad offensive philosophy – which you have – if it bit you on the neck. You’re laying off blame on the players – they didn’t execute – when the blame falls 100 percent on you.

You also said, “The start (of the season) is not that important. Obviously, we want to be better than 0-3 right now. I feel we have a good football team. There were some things in the first three games that just haven’t quite gone the way you’d want them to go. The season is still early and we have to make some hard decisions early on and get back on the right track.”

Coach, the season is not early. It’s almost one-fifth over and you have no wins.

You can’t keep using the “early” excuse and you can’t claim things haven’t gone your way. You didn’t make them go your way. You are the agent of your own sad fate.

I conclude with this quote from Vernon Davis, your chief acolyte. Asked what the 49ers need to do, he said, “That’s not my ballpark. I’ll let coach Singletary deal with that. He’s the head coach, he makes the decisions. Whatever decisions he makes I’ll support.”

Davis has confidence in you, Mike. Should he? Will you make the right decisions? Do you even know how?

For more on the world of sports in general and the Bay Area in particular go to the Cohn Zohn at cohn.blogs.pressdemocrat.com. You can reach Staff Columnist Lowell Cohn at lowell.cohn@pressdemocrat.com.

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