Five weeks into the NFL season the San Francisco 49ers find themselves staring at an 0-5 record with few signs that things will improve any time soon. Many of us thought the team could manage a victory over the Eagles and turn that into a nice winning streak. Instead things seemed to get even worse between the crowd flipping out on Alex Smith, the defense struggling mightily against a banged up Eagles offense, and Mike Singletary looking fairly helpless during the game and in the post-game and day after press conferences.
And yet amidst all this insanity, things actually managed to take a turn for the surreal. Over the weekend, 49ers president and owner Jed York appeared on a local show called Press Here and stated that Coach Singletary's job was not in jeopardy and that Singletary was going to be the coach this season. The people on the show tried to press him to basically state what it would take to fire Singletary and Jed York seemed to spin out of it. He said the team would focus on beating Philadelphia and that was that.
And then the Eagles came in and beat the Eagles on Sunday Nigh Football and things took a random turn. One of the many topics of discussion here yesterday was the ESPN report that York had texted the network (I think Adam Schefter) and stated that the 49ers would win the NFC West. York has since clarified his point (sort of) in an interview with CSN Bay Area:
Q: You mentioned winning the NFC West in a message to ESPN's Adam Schefter. Why make that statement now?
York: Adam asked if we were going to fire our coach, and I respectfully said, 'Adam, we're going to win our division.'
Well then. I guess my question at this point then is what to make of this. We had some discussion in a FanPost about this subject but I figured this was certainly worthy of a front page post. In the FanPost, there were certainly a mix of opinions. The general line of thought was that Jed York might have been hitting the bottle and I can certainly see why people might sense that given the timing of the comment.
Another line of thought is that this is a way for York to wrap the anchor around himself and deflect the media's attention away from the team's struggles and basically just try and get the team itself out of the spotlight. I don't know if I buy into that at this point, but it's certainly a plausible explanation.
So which is it? Is this a smart move that could help the team? Or is Jed York gracefully stepping into the role of Nero fiddling away as Rome burns down to the ground?
On a side note, given how much turmoil there is with the 49ers, we'll certainly need a way to keep track of this over the next few months. For those who don't check out the SB Nation Bay Area website, we have something we call story streams. A story stream as the name might indicate follows the development of a given story throughout the life of said story. For example, here's our story stream for the Giants just completed playoff series against the Braves. It allows you to see all the developments on one page.
I mention this because we now have a 49ers in Turmoil story stream for all the upcoming shifting and shaking we're sure to see. If the 49ers decide to can Singletary we'll update it. Even if the 49ers do not fire Singletary, we'll at least be updating all the media commentary on the situation. Either way, it'll be something worth checking out in the coming months as we add updates.