Knucklehead of the Week Award

This week's "Knucklehead of the Week" award goes to the coaching staff of the San Francisco 49ers, specifically to head coach Mike Singletary, and offenive coordinator Mike Martz.

The beauty of this award is that it could have been awarded on Monday night/Tuesday morning immediately following Monday's night's near-miss against the Arizona Cardinals. However, as the week has gone on, the choice has become even more clear.

I'm not going to run through all the gory details of the end of the game in this space. If you want a good synopsis, look here. Suffices to say, some very poor clock management, and overall game management, cost the 49ers their chance at a big comeback win on the road, which would have been the first since Singletary took over as interim coach, in place of the fired Mike Nolan. Anyone who watched the final plays of that game probably wouldn't even think of arguing with this selection.

However, the coaches have since compounded their knucklehead status by blaming the refs for their misfortune, an assertion which truly boggles the mind. Did the refs handle the situation perfectly? Probably not, but they never do. However, there's a couple of realities in play here. First of all, the 49ers should have never been in the kind of clock crunch that they wound up in, because after converting the first down that got them down close to the goal line, they wasted a good 10-15 seconds because they couldn't get organized enough to run a spike play. It was crazy to watch, there was confusion all over the place, and while they did have a new QB running the show, that blame HAS to fall on the coaches.

Given that, let's deal with a few of these accusations against the refs:
#1. The 49ers thought the refs might put time back on the clock after the replay, back to where it was when Gore was initially ruled down. Um, no. That's not how it works. Gore was ruled down within the field of play, and San Francisco didn't have a timeout. That means the clock continues to run, which is why San Francisco was scrambling to spike the ball before the signal came down from the booth to review the play (more on this later). Running the clock back to where it was when Gore went down would have been the equivalent of giving the 49ers the benefit of a timeout they didn't have, and couldn't call.

#2. The refs didn't tell the 49ers that the spot was going to be moved, which is why 49ers ran a dive play from the 2 1/2 yard line. Okay, first of all, the ref told ME, the viewer on TV, along with everyone in the stadium via the loudspeaker where the ball was going to be spotted. Secondly, any time a review happens, any thing the refs see is fair game, even if something that isn't what they were supposed to look for. So, even though the purpose of the review was to see if Gore was down by contact, the spot of the ball comes into play. I know that, so I'm assuming that's a tidbit coaches should have in their file. Teams have their own people up in the booth looking at replays, so Martz should have been asking, or someone should have told him, what they were seeing and where the ball was going to be spotted.

#3. The way the refs handled the situation left the 49ers no choice but to go with their poor play call. I will say that there was very little time between when the announcement was made and the whistle was blown starting the clock, so if I were to give the coaches the benefit of the doubt regarding not doing their own homework to figure out where the ball was going to be, they'd have a point here. Except for the fact that it was 3rd down. I understand that they didn't have enough time to call another play, but it doesn't take a lot of time to scream "SPIKE IT!", which is all the 49ers would have needed to do to stop the clock and let them collect themselves with a new play. That's what they were planning to do with their 3rd play anyhow, why not go with it?

#4. If the refs had just let them go ahead with the original spike on 3rd down, instead of the review, none of this would have happened. Well, Martz was dead right about that. If they had let the spike stand, they would have also had to let the procedure penalty they had flagged on the spike play stand. Such penalties stop the clock, so in order to prevent a team from effective using such a penalty to give them an extra timeout late in the game, there's a mandatory 10 second run-off of the clock. There was less than 10 seconds left, so game over, in a much cleaner fashion. In other words, Martz criticized the refs for a decision that was actually a big help to the 49ers chances.

I'm going to cut Mike Singletary a bit of slack here, he's not just a new head coach with the 49ers, he's a first time head coach, you're going to expect some rookie mistakes. Mike Martz, however, has spent years as a coordinator and head coach, and clearly has bought into his prior status as an offensive "genius". He should know better. (Martz also added to his knucklehead status by later claiming that the ball was actually spotted on the 3 1/2 yard line (it wasn't) and that he was given that information by the fired Mike Nolan who was watching on TV. Good stuff. Was Martz actually at the game?). Come on guys. You screwed up, just own it. Is that too much to ask? (Yeah, I know it is)

Maybe the "Knucklehead of the Week" award will help take some of the sting out of this loss. Congrats, gentlemen.