but makes me kind of nervous that the yorks saw something that no one else did. chalk it up to their record post nolan's firing, that had to play the biggest part...

http://www.cbssports.com/mcc/blogs/entry/6315047/26671582

Mike Singletary had the perfect temperament to be a middle linebacker.

It cost him as a head coach.


He was just too volatile and too unprepared. In the end, that helped cost him his job. As word made its way through the NFL Sunday night that Singletary was being fired, all I could think about was conversations I had with some of his former players.


They all talked about how Singletary was over his head. They said he was as unprepared as any coach they had ever played for in their lives -- including high school.


The game plans were simple. The attention to detail, lacking.

That's not unlike what you heard about Singletary's interviews with some owners. He was never impressive, according to some league sources.


I just think he was fast-tracked to the position, without paying his dues. Now we see what happens often in those situations.

Singletary strikes me more as an assistant than a head coach. In the end, he was just way too emotional.


That's good when your ramming heads with running backs. It's not good when you're trying to lead 53 men who hang on your every word.


Singletary was asked to resign by the 49ers and he was defiant in that, refusing to do so, which led to his being fired. I would have done the same thing. Why leave without a fight?


I wouldn't have expected anything less from Samurai Mike.


Too bad his emotions might have been what cut his own head off. Here’s a prediction: The 49ers will hire either Jon Gruden or Jim Harbaugh. At least those two have head-coaching experience and their game plans are far from primitive.


http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/story/14482378/unseasoned-singletary-set-up-to-fail-by-49ers-from-start

Imagine Mike Singletary's next football job. Imagine that it's one that actually prepares him for the job he just had, rather than one which exposes his tactical flaws and reduces him to a caricature.

Imagine Mike Singletary Lite.

The San Francisco 49ers just eliminated Singletary's gig, after just 40 cracks at it. It is the same number of games Frank Kush got, one less than Hall of Famers Ernie Nevers and Jim Thorpe, and two fewer than Otto Graham and Sammy Baugh. Of those, he had the best record -- 18-22 -- and the most exposure as a coach who got the job based almost entirely on his résumé as a player.



In other words, his flaws were not unique, but they were more catalogued. He thought his inspirational gifts, fueled by his own career, would be sufficiently instructive to a generation decades removed from his best work.

And the players tried to be impressed by his résumé, and they did revivify their belief in the game and its most clichéd verities. But they needed more -- they needed technological competence, a steady and non-impulsive hand that believed in a core set of football theories and stayed true to them.

Mike Singletary didn't because he couldn't. He'd been rushed into the job without any experience running his own half of a team, let alone his own shop, and he found out that even the best one-trick pony still doesn't have enough tricks.

There are more reasons why the 49ers failed in 2010, starting with an organization that lacks enough football people to run a modern NFL team, ranging through a roster that has its share of interesting players but more than its share of ordinary to substandard ones, and ending with an embarrassing trust in the power of being in a rotten division.

Good teams don't keep score backward, as in "all we need is X number of wins," but it was the only thing the 49ers had to hang their helmets upon this year, and when they went 0-5 to start the year, people around them kept rationalizing that their 0-5 was better than most 0-5s because their most direct competition was gimping about at 2-3.

It was a stupid place to put the bar of achievement, and the 49ers deserved the result of that thinking. They diminished themselves and their reputations, spending another precious year of their careers pushing a tractor motor halfway up a muddy hill with their teeth and then sliding back to the bottom, as they did Sunday against St. Louis.

Singletary was exposed yet again as the motivator who could no longer motivate, the coach players liked but could not find the strength to believe in any longer. Put another way, when you're getting sideline sass from Troy Smith, you've lost the room.

But Singletary succeeded as much as he had the tools to succeed. Had he been a coordinator for a couple of years, or a head coach at a college, the story might well have been different, but we won't know if that is true until he gets his next job, whenever and wherever that is.

There may be a big-time coach in Mike Singletary, and the 49ers might have been his entry-level position. That speaks more to the 49ers' failures and less to his. But it also shows us yet again that when the face of the franchise is the coach, the inverted pyramid is badly askew. Singletary gave great/amusing/disjointed/anachronistic pressers, and if that weren't the 31st most important part of the job, he'd have left San Francisco a more beloved figure.

But there was always too much of him and not enough of the players. Not because he wanted to be the star, but because he couldn't make any others. That is essentially the problem Ernie Nevers had in Chicago, and Otto Graham in Washington, and Sammy Baugh in New York and Houston -- that the guys who hired them believed in their pasts, but the guys they coached wanted to know about their own futures. Names are made from the giants of the past, and games are won by the titans of the future. So it has always been, so it shall always be.