Mike Singletary Puts on the Film, Sees a Horror Movie, Fires Jimmy Raye

While thinking about this awful mess your San Francisco 49ers have gotten themselves into, I absentmindedly started listing off not just their problems, but really, all the things that bother me about sports.

I realized something.

More than player arrests, more than the steroids, more than guys thinking that giving effort on every play is an unreasonable thing to expect for a mere $12 million salary, even more than guys celebrating a tackle after a four-yard gain in the second quarter like they just won the Super Bowl, I figured out what annoys me the most.

Clichés.

I’ve watched sports all my life and have seen or read probably 50,000 interviews by now, so I knew going into this business that I’d be in store for a truckload of clichés every day.

But still, I never imagined I’d be deluged with them to the extent that I have been. For most of the athletes and coaches I’ve covered, literally everything they’ve ever said on the record has been a cliché. 

Sometimes you’ll read an interview and you’ll see the writer stick a cliché in there for one of the quotes, and you’ll think to yourself, “What a lazy hack, using that in his story instead of something interesting.”

You don’t realize that for every cliché that makes it to print, 20 get ignored. If an athlete or coach has a boring quote appear in the paper, it’s not because something more revealing wasn’t used.

No, that bland “working our tails off” nonsense you read is literally the most interesting thing they said in 15 minutes.

I bring this up because the latest cliché sensation, particularly within the gridiron community, seems to be, “We’ll have to look at the film.”

It’s such a silly, transparent way of ducking a question that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, if he really has the game’s best interests at heart, should immediately institute a new policy in which whoever tells a reporter that he has to look at the film will immediately be docked $10,000.

A week ago, Philadelphia Eagles' head coach Andy Reid—fresh off a too-close-for-comfort 35-32 victory over the hapless Detroit Lions in which quarterback Michael Vick played brilliantly in place of Kevin Kolb, who missed the game with a concussion—declared that Kolb would be the starter the following week at Jacksonville.

Naturally, some reporters questioned the wisdom of that idea since Vick was sacked six times at Detroit and only his preternatural quickness and Houdini-like powers of escaping from danger prevented a half dozen more.

Wouldn’t the less-mobile Kolb be a sitting duck behind the matadors you call an offensive line, they asked?

Reid responded that he would have to look at the film to see how the line played.

Two days later, Reid flip-flopped and declared that Vick was his new starting quarterback.

Why the change of heart, coach?

“[Kolb’s] just in a situation where he's got an ex-superstar that now has regained his abilities; and it's really that simple. Michael Vick is playing out of his mind right now.”

Oh really? You needed to watch the film to see that Vick played well?

It was kind of obvious to everyone who watched the game, “Big Red.” That’s why you got asked about it afterward.

Yesterday, it was Mike Singletary’s turn to plead ignorance on all matters football pre-inspection of the all-important celluloid. Let’s sneak a peek at the postgame transcript, courtesy of Tim Kawakami of The San Jose Mercury News.

Are you thinking about making any personnel or coaching changes, coach?

“I think right now, I think what we’re going to do is get back and look at the film and hold off on making any changes until we look at the film and go from there.”

Is it possible that you have major structural problems that you have to fix?

“I would just say this, I think right now, we’ll look at the film and see what’s there and we’ll make decisions accordingly.”

The Chiefs really seemed to come out aggressively. Do you feel like you guys were out-coached today?

“I would not say out-coached. I think that’s something that you could always say, ‘well, we were out-coached.’ But I think in a loss like this, a lot of things look wrong. But I think the most important thing is that we look at the film and we evaluate it correctly and go from there.”

You’re 0-3, is it possible to make big changes this far into a season?

“Right now, we really are going to look at the film and just whatever changes we have to make in order to right some things, we’ll do that. But we just have to get back and look at the film.”

Can you work things out before next week’s game in Atlanta?

“Once we look at the film, we will. We’ll do what we have to do to get it right.”

Can you say that Jimmy Raye will definitely be the offensive coordinator the rest of this year?

“Yes.”

A scant 20 hours later, the axe fell on offensive coordinator Jimmy Raye. Why the sudden reversal?

“Well, after I got back here I went home and I said you know what, I’m just going to go back and look at the film. So I came back here and basically spent the night here looking at film and just kind of looked at the overall view of where we are, and where we need to go and felt that I needed to make the change."

Again, that dastardly film was responsible for all this carnage.

Where’s the beef? 10 minutes to Wapner. That’s what she said. Gotta look at the film.

Where’s the beef? 10 minutes to Wapner. That’s what she said. Gotta look at the film.

Where’s the beef? 10 minutes to Wapner. That’s what she said. Gotta look at the film.

Let me let you in on a little secret, boys and girls. NFL coaches are never as obtuse as they pretend to be. These guys notice everything that’s going on during the game the same as we do plus 100 other things we couldn’t dream of catching.

“We’ve got to look at film,” is a polite way of saying one of two things: I know what went wrong, I know how I’m going to fix it, and I have no intention of telling you; or I know what went wrong, but I have no idea whatsoever how to fix it and I need to stall.

Still, it’s a bit insulting for Singletary to tell us he needed to look at the film before deciding to relieve Raye of his duties.

Rookie right tackle Anthony Davis was beat around the edge for three sacks. Just flat out beat by Chiefs' end Tamba Hali. There were no exotic blitzes or trick stunts on those plays to confuse the 20-year old. He was just too slow off the snap.

You don’t need film to show you that, just like you don’t need film to show you that the Chiefs were overloading the box to take away Frank Gore in the first half and that they were calling screens and draws to take advantage of over-aggressive and one-dimensional pass rushers, Ahmad Brooks and Travis LaBoy.

You don’t need to look at the film to realize that calling three running plays in succession late in the second half when you’re down 21 points goes beyond being unimaginative.

It’s clueless. It’s coaching scared.

If Singletary, who no doubt has 100 people on the sidelines telling him what went wrong on any screw-up in case he can't tell for himself (for example, offensive line coach Mike Solari and his assistant Ray Brown get to exclusively watch the linemen), really needs to watch the film to tell where the breakdowns were, he's in deeper trouble than I thought.

That Raye had to go was obvious. He is at least a generation behind the times and that might be generous. Whether Singletary actually figured out he had to can him all by himself (as he adamantly claimed on the day of reckoning) or had his arm twisted into it by team president Jed York isn’t frankly all that interesting to me.

Singletary has wavered so many times on so many fronts over his two years and change at the helm, that it’s more surprising when things don’t change than when they do.

When asked if new offensive coordinator (and former quarterbacks' coach) Mike Johnson will open up the attack and have a more aggressive philosophy than Raye’s smash-mouth approach, Singletary again showed his flip-flopping nature and his laissez-faire attitude to X’s and O’s.

“The most important thing to me is winning,” he said. “How we do it, I really don’t care….We can talk philosophy…opening it up, closing it up, whatever it is. But the bottom line is winning. I want to do what we need to do to win games. That’s the philosophy that I want to become familiar with.”

Not quite as bumper sticker friendly as “Physical with an ‘F’” now is it?

I suppose at the end of the day it is what it is. “Coach Sing” will make sure the guys work their tails off and they’ll take it one play at a time and if the good lord is willing maybe this coaching change will make a difference at Sunday.

Of course, Singletary won’t know for sure until he looks at the film.