Eric Mangini rumors include offensive coaching positions

Last June, Jim Harbaugh hired former Browns and Jets head coach Eric Mangini as a senior offensive consultant. His role remained a bit of a mystery over the season, but it sounds like he provided assistance with instant replay. We speculated he provided a defensive look for the offense, but that was mostly just guess-work.

It was always sort of a random connection, and now it might get a little more random. Yesterday afternoon, Tim Kawakami tweeted that Mangini was likely to move to a position coach role with the 49ers in 2014. Last night, Matt Maiocco and Mindi Bach provided some hypothetical insight. According to Matt & Mindi, if Greg Roman had been hired for a head coaching position, one option to replace him was promoting quarterbacks coach Geep Chryst to OC, and then moving Mangini into the role of QB coach.

The M&M report was then followed by Tim Kawakami tweeting that he had "definitely heard" that Mangini could land an offensive position coach role with the team.

Ummm, ok? Mangini's career prior to 2013 involved head coaching jobs, and defensive assistant jobs, with one season as an offensive assistant in 1996. I suppose he could have shown something to Jim Harbaugh in the past year, but I'm still confused by the whole situation. This isn't happening yet since Roman is sticking around for now, but the notion of Mangini as an offensive position coach just seems odd.

It's worth noting that a rumor floated around earlier this month that he was one option being considered as the Houston Texans offensive coordinator. Nothing ever came of that, but it's still one more puzzling part of this whole thing.

Any ideas on this?