Feel free to keep making Super Bowl picks in the post below.  

In the meantime, I've been emailing with Matt Barrows over at the Sacramento Bee since Manusky was hired and Matt provided some of his own insight based on both yesterday's introductory press conference, and his own information from writing about the league.  Based on his column yesterday, Matt seems to indicate that Manusky's knowledge of and work with the 3-4 defense helped in his hiring.  I asked him if that was what got him the job over Singletary, or what might have factored into that decision.  Matt said,

What I get out of this is that Nolan doesn't want to have to go through multiple coordinators in the next couple of years considering Singletary is bound to get hired as a head coach somewhere at some point in the very near future.  I like the idea of a high energy guy running the defense and getting the guys fired up, and it sounds like Manusky is the type of guy to do that.  It remains to be seen if he can handle the play-calling, but if it gets ugly I suppose Nolan can go back to calling the plays and it will simply be a replay of the Billy Davis era.

Anyways, this certainly makes me feel a little better about this hiring.  And as always, this is coming from outside the organization so there could be a million other things going on.  Nonetheless this is insightful information.  And I'll have to be a Manusky fan simply because we share the same birthday!

I encourage you to check out Matt's Q&A blog over at Sacbee.com.  We're gonna try and get a couple more Q&A's with him, but in the meantime that's a solid option for answering your 49er questions.