Singletary-To-Raye-To-Johnson-To-Smith Equals a Phone Tag Disaster

You'll forgive me for this column being a bit late.

It wasn't my fault—I handed it in to Mike Johnson and then he relayed it over to Alex Smith, who was supposed to email it to the Bleacher Report editors, but it got intercepted by SB Nation.

Yes, that was a bad joke.

An even worse joke is the supposed "system" your San Francisco 49ers use for getting plays from offensive coordinator Jimmy Raye's Mesozoic Era playbook into quarterback Alex Smith's ear canal; a process that, as far as it's been explained to us by both Smith and head coach Mike Singletary, sounds more convoluted than the ending of "Lost."

You would think that the simple act of calling a play would be fairly straightforward and involve only two people: the coordinator and the quarterback. This is by and large how most normal teams operate.

The 49ers, however, don't like to do anything the conventional, modern way, as evidenced by their love affair with terrible fullback Moran Norris (more on him later).

No, what they do is have Raye, who's a generation older and ten times more adorable than most of his play-calling counterparts, a million miles up in the coaches' booth. Once he's appraised of how the previous play has worked out and the resulting down and distance by a spotter, Raye then dials up another of the, oh, 4,182 different synonyms he's got for "Gore up the middle" and gives the play call to quarterback coach Mike Johnson.

Yes, the team indeed employs a quarterback coach. In case you were wondering.

Anyway, Johnson, who stands on the sideline next to Singletary, gets the call from Raye and relays it into Smith's helmet.

Instinctively, this sounds goofy to you—the layperson whose involvement with the NFL extends no further than your TV set, your fantasy team, and the occasional inspired phone call to your bookie.

Here's why you're perfectly right to be dubious: An NFL play clock is 40 seconds. While this might seem like an interminable amount of time when you're at home and plotting to do unspeakable things to Joe Buck, it's really not.

The second a play ends, a coach has to compute a hundred different variables, such as the down and distance, who got shaken up on the last play, how's the rookie right tackle playing, how much contact the refs have been allowing the defensive backs to get away with, the field conditions, the wind, how well his flanker can execute a post route, and so on.

Once he makes up his mind on what to call, he's got alert the other people on the sidelines to get the right personnel package on the field. Note that it's illegal to have 12 men in the huddle, so the choreographing of large bodies subbing in and out has to be seamless.

The receiver in the quarterback's helmet cuts off after 15 seconds. On Monday, Smith disclosed that in a perfect world he would like to have the call by the 24 second mark, allowing him to get the offense out of the huddle with 18 seconds to go and lined up correctly another half dozen seconds later.

All of these things transpiring in concert would then allow Smith, in this magical fantasy land of faeries and unicorns and wide receivers who know what the heck they're supposed to be doing, to have a solid ten seconds or so to completely diagnose the opposing defense's intentions and counteract them by audibling out of Raye's play into something that has a puncher's chance of working.

Of course, in this fantasy world, Michael Crabtree would have Dominique Zeigler's work ethic and humility, Smith would have Drew Brees' accuracy, and people like Raye and Norris would be making magic together in the UFL.

NFL play calls are in nature very verbose. Smith shared an example of one of the most basic run calls, of which again there are 4,182 of, in Sunday's game plan and it was ten words long and took him roughly three-and-a-half seconds to recite. 

He explained that this was a simple, first down running play and that, in general, pass plays are far longer, as are third down plays. One can only fathom what a third down pass play must sound like—I'm guessing entire interviews with rookie guard Mike Iupati have fewer words involved.

So let's take all that in and say, for the sake of argument, that it takes four seconds for Raye to process all the critical information from the previous play that we've already discussed and another four to figure out a play to call on 3rd-and-1 when he's looking to call a play-action pass.

That's already eight seconds in our hypothetical; in my opinion, that is a conservative estimate that flatters Raye.

Say it takes him another five seconds to spit out the whole call to Johnson. That's 13 seconds gone.

Johnson, you figure, takes two seconds to absorb the call and another two to bark out the marching orders for the proper personnel group. If it involves Norris, the battle has already been lost, but I digress.

That's 17 seconds gone, if you're keeping count.

He repeats the call to Smith, taking the same five seconds it took Raye. That's 22 seconds.

Success! The whole play has been successfully related to Smith, with a whopping three seconds to spare on the radio and 18 seconds left on the play clock. He gives the other ten fellas the call with 13 to go, everyone lines up around the eight second mark, and the quarterback has a whopping six seconds or so to figure out they're playing a Cover 2 behind a zone blitz by the "Will" linebacker.

Really, it's more like three seconds, once you account for Zeigler having to tell Crabtree where to line up, as he had to numerous times on Sunday.

That doesn't sound like there's any time left to audible, does it?

Mind you that all of the above is what happens in a best case scenario. When you throw a wrench into the works, such as Singletary debating with his inner Ditka whether to go for it or not on 4th-and-goal for five seconds, well that's a recipe for chaos.

Well, chaos, time outs wasted, and another heaping serving of Moran friggin' Norris.

Smith explained that far too often for his liking, the best case scenario did not happen for him and that a number of times, he had to guess what the play call would be because his receiver cut out in the middle of Johnson's delivery.

"The helmet cuts out at 15 on the play clock, so sometimes you're getting partial calls because it's getting relayed through," he revealed.

"I have a pretty good feel for the game plan, so most of the time when that happens, I can go with it. The times where I'm erring on the side of caution are the big situations where we're taking the timeouts - the 3rd-and-one, 4th-and-one - where I don't know if it's worth it for us running up there trying to get the play off where it's potentially one of those plays that can change a game."

Smith said the times the calls came the latest were in those critical times early in the game, around the Seahawks goal line where he had to call those time outs, meaning that either Singletary or Raye froze.

Perhaps both.

He had several ideas to fix the problem. One was to all him the freedom to call his own play if he's not hearing a call by the 24-second mark. Again, that's just an arbitrary number he threw out. It just as well could be 22.

Another solution was to put the entire game plan on laminated cards on his wrist band, or at least the important, wordy, third down and red zone stuff. Many college teams and a few NFL ones, such as the New York Jets last year, do this.

The idea behind it is to attach a number to each play, so for example, "Heavy zebra right 863 shallow cross flanker jet spike walla-walla-bing-bang on two," gets turned into "Heavy zebra right 43 on two."

Raye can get the call quicker to Johnson, who can in turn get it quicker to Smith. Hallelujah.

Of course, the simplest solution would be to just remove Johnson from the equation, cut out the middle man and just have Raye speaking directly to Smith. This seems to be the change Singletary is most inclined to make.

"I think what happens sometimes is when you call a play—first of all, you’re looking at what happened, and you’re trying to figure out, ‘well why did this happen, why did that happen,’ and you get the play and you’ve got 15 seconds before it goes off," Singletary explained.

"So that’s a lot to be able to get in and I know Jimmy (Raye) understands that he has to do a better job of getting it in and we’re going to work on it this week and get it where it needs to be. But that’s just something that we will work out."

Well, how ya gonna do that, coach?

"We will take a hard look at it, and we will have an answer for it. We will figure it out in the next few days exactly how we are going to do that and exactly how this is going to get better. Whether Jimmy comes on the field, or however it is, we’re going to figure it out and nip it in the bud."

For his part, Raye has always preferred to be up in the booth, to have a topographical view of the field. In the hustle and bustle of the sidelines, it's hard to see why a play works (or in the 49ers case, doesn't). It would be difficult for him to be in the booth giving the order to Smith directly because it would create confusion about personnel packages on the field.

Singletary meanwhile, copped to his blame in all this mess, admitting that he has to make the call to go for it or kick faster.

"It has to be and it will be," he said during Monday's debriefing.

However, Smith and his coaches go about fixing the problem, the hard truth of the matter is that it may very well amount to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

It could just be that Raye's offense is too behind the times to work in the modern NFL. It could be that Smith will never be more than an inaccurate, easily-rattled quarterback who needs everything and everyone around him to be perfect to execute a simple eight yard hitch route to his tight end.

It could be that neither are good enough and never will be.

All that we know for sure is that nobody in the room was pointing the finger at Norris, which is fortunate for him because Brit Miller, the fullback they cut in his stead, would have totally caught that ball.

Just sayin'.