It's been said not long ago on here that the 49ers are building a bully. I contend that we already did that last season. Over the offseason we had a growth spurt. Early in the season we suffered from growing pains and Dallas beat us, but we grew into ourselves and became a wall. Nothing could hurt us. Nothing could stop us until we picked on someone our own size; another wall named B. Ravens. So we went back to picking on people smaller than us. Arizona beat us but that was just a fluke, right? That's what we all thought until the NFCCG. As Sando pointed out on ESPN's NFC West blog a while back, every team we played a second time did a whole lot better against us.

http://espn.go.com/blog/nfcwest/post/_/id/61985/video-gaining-ground-on-the-49ers

We were the prototypical schoolyard bully: Big, mean, and predictable. We could beat up the shrimpy kids once, but it wasn't so easy the second time around. For the 2012 season, we're no longer building a bully. We did that already. Now we're dropping a few pounds to get into fighting shape. We're still going to be big and mean, but with all of our additions this offseason, we're hoping to be quick too with a whole new repertoire of attacks to take on even our nastiest opponents.

If we were a bully last year, then this year we're a MMA fighter.