Singletary Handles Crabtree, Solidifies Locker Room

The five-time Super Bowl Champion 49ers are no longer one of the few teams jostling at the summit of Mount NFL. Once upon a time, the 49ers boasted the finest football minds and athletes and marched toward January year after year. After the departures of mainstays like Stubblefield and Young, the once-proud Niners fell into a funk (hastened by the antics of T.O. and the front office), and fans began to settle for Wild Card berths rather than demanding rings. Now, after a 7-9 2008, the 49ers finally and happily find themselves back in winners’ territory, poised to make a deep playoff run with experienced, talented leaders on both sides of the ball in Willis and Gore. Enter Michael Crabtree.

 Hailed by the 49er faithful as THE missing piece on Draft Day, Crabtree’s relationship with the Bay Area has quickly soured, and the young man hailed as the second coming of Jerry Rice is now eliciting negative personality comparisons to Terrell Owens and Chad Ocho Cinco. In the past few years, this is usually where things got ugly (i.e. Owens questioning Garcia’s sexuality) and San Francisco would enter the season as a house divided against itself, unable to stand, let alone win games. When Crabtree’s cousin/agent came out with the statement that Crabtree was prepared to re-enter the draft in 2010, the resigned mood that marked most of the Bay Area’s reporting on the statement seemed all too familiar. Then, the bespectacled, controlled fury that is Mike Singletary spoke into a microphone.

Head Coach Mike Singletary’s recent comments on the possibility of Crabtree sitting out all of ‘09 might have smacked of a standard non-answer, but they also sent a strong message to the front office and the player personnel. Singletary’s stoic, dignified dismissal of Crabtree’s holdout establishes a team-first ethic that everyone who dons the red and gold will have to answer to this season and beyond, Crabtree included. Singletary’s outright refusal to have the developmental efforts of his team held hostage by the cocky Crabtree clearly states that no one man on Singletary’s teams will be labeled a messiah.

            Nothing could be more vital for this team at this stage in their rebuilding process. Not only has Singletary freed his players from having to comment on Crabtree, he’s freed Crabtree himself from worrying about potential scrutiny from his would-be teammates, crucially drawing an insulating line between the world inside and outside of the gridiron. With a few choice words from their Head Coach, a team became a family, with Singletary at the head of the table. Singletary made it abundantly clear, for all parties involved, that Crabtree’s prima donna act plays just fine outside the confines of the 49er locker room. But in pads and spikes he’ll be treated no different than the rest of the squad, top-10 pick or otherwise.

            This hard-line attitude is literally all that has been keeping the 49ers from their former spot atop the football world (though Jim Druckenmiller definitely didn’t help). With smashmouth Singletary at the helm, the 49ers finally have a chance to become a close-knit, winning team again. Singletary has shown he can handle the tough team politics questions with aplomb. More importantly, he’s willing to be the face of the franchise, allowing his players to focus on Sunday afternoons, rather than worry about Monday morning quarterbacks. This is 49er football the Singletary way, the smart way, the way of the team, the championship way. Indeed, it’s more than refreshing when the head coach of a team holds himself up as the example of the way things need to be done, rather than pointing out one of his players as a negative example. It’s the kind of character that’s been missing on the Candlestick sidelines since Walsh and Seifert, and it’s no coincidence that the Niners went 5-0 in Super Bowls under those men. Surely, San Francisco will not open 2009 with a roster even close to the talent on those Super Bowl-winning teams. But they will have a championship-caliber coach prowling the sidelines, demanding, with every step and breath, a championship-level team that “goes out and hits people in the mouth”.