Maybe if Mike Singletary showed his butt on Monday Night the refs would have told him where the line of scrimmage was. Mike Singletary, to me, is one of those guys that no matter what he does, he'll be praised for his methods. Why? Because he personifies what we believe are the qualities of a "model football coach." He is loud, intense, has plenty of people to tell you how scary he is, he stresses accountability, he doesn't value one player over another, he stresses flat discipline, across the board, all of the time. He has everything an owner could want when building his super franchise, except, he hasn't even won a game yet.

When Mike Nolan agreed to step down (or got fired, however you look at it), he strongly recommended that Mike Singletary be allowed to come in as his successor. Now, everybody knows the connection Samurai Mike has to ESPN's own coach Mike Ditka, and we all know the tales of what Ditka can do to both a hurricane and a bus, and Mike Singletary seems to be an off shoot of all Mike Ditka was, in 1985. He's obsessed with accountability, which I'm not knocking in any way, but it gets to the point where a Head Coach needs to stop preaching about his ideals and start actually doing some things on the sidelines, like figuring out where the line of scrimmage is. Seriously, I can't put this all on him, NFL teams have like 2 coaches and 3 staffers for every player on the field, one of them couldn't figure out where the line of scrimmage was?

This is my diagnosis as to what's wrong with Singletary: He came in, expected to create a culture using fear and unconventional tactics, and he's knocked everyone off their game. The fact is your dealing with adults who are being paid to play. If they don't play, or if they act like children, eventually they are going to suffer for it. These aren't kids who need an example made of them; these are a collection of professionals, playing a complicated team game, who rely on you to provide them with the tools they need to win, like something other than a fullback dive from the 3 yard line on the last play of the game. Mike Singletary seems like the kind of coach cut out of Any Given Sunday, just a symbol that tries to use words and actions to inspire magical change in his players. The 49ers don't really need an internal change in the players that they already have, they just need a decent play call from their coaches, oh and it might not hurt to go out and get some "good" players.