The San Francisco 49ers fired coach Mike Nolan on
Monday night. Former Hall of Fame linebacker Mike Singletary will take over for
the rest of the season, general manager Scot McCloughan said.
The 49ers could not even wait until next weeks bye as they are just seven
games into a strange season. Nolan seemed to have no idea he would be fired when
he conducted his usual news conference earlier Monday. Several team
executives—including Jed York—and coaches either wouldn’t comment or didn’t
return phone messages, e-mails or text messages, while most 49ers players only
knew what they heard on television. The 49ers today are starting to look a lot
like another California team that shall remain nameless.
Though the 49ers are just 2-5, this has been a very odd season. This last
weekend, for the fourth game in a row, the San Francisco 49ers played a
legitimate playoff contender that just happened to be coming off a loss. The
weeks prior they lost games to the Eagles, Patriots, and Saints who were all
coming off losses. The only other loss was to first place Arizona. It would have
made more sense to see what happened once the schedule got a little fairer,
however no one ever said the NFL was fair.
Nolan was 18-37 in 3 1/2 seasons with the 49ers after being hired to run all
football operations in a strange move to begin with. Making it even stranger at
the end of last season, he ceded GM powers to Scot McCloughan who has now
terminated Nolan.
Nolan did bring back a measure of respectability to the franchise, which had
the NFL’s worst record in 2004 before his arrival, the 49ers haven’t managed a
winning season or made a significant impact on the league in his tenure and the
49ers thought things were getting worse instead of improving. Thus the change
was made.
Singletary, the famed centerpiece of the Bears’ dominant defense on their
1986 Super Bowl team, has been at Nolan’s side since 2003, when he worked for
Nolan on the Baltimore Ravens’ coaching staff.
Singletary interviewed for a handful of head coaching vacancies in recent years,
but was out of the NFL from the end of his playing career in 1992 until joining
the Ravens.
The promotion of Singletary strikes us as unusual in that although they have
a ready made head coach in offensive coordinator Mike Martz, the defense this
year has given up a league high 196 points under Singletary. However the same
situation arose in St. Louis recently and although eerily similar, it seems to
have worked out well.
