Panning for Comedy Gold with the 49ers

Welcome to the latest in our 32 part series, Better Know a Football Team.

2005 recap: 4-12, strangely unfunny despite sucking. A shame, really. In 2005 the 49ers were the rare team where the players fought hard for a very good coach but still lost week in and week out because the players were so eminently shitty. There’s no humor in that. Kissing Suzy Kolber’s favorite bad teams to laugh at are the ones that are poorly coached and underachieve... the ones that implode due to prima donna stars ruining chemistry... the ones that are run by Matt Millen.

There was one comedic highlight for the Niners last year: the Reggie Bowl, the Week 17 showdown with Houston where two fan bases were united in their desire for the opposing team to win. Of course, the Texans won the Reggie Bush Sweepstakes by losing the game, then promptly fucked that up by picking Mario Freaking Williams.


A just God would have delivered Bush to the Niners when he fell to #2... except that by winning their final game of the season, the 49ers were rewarded with the #6 pick. That's just sad and unfair. Well, and funny, too. But it's the kind of funny that I feel bad laughing about -- kind of like when I watch this.

Potential for comedy in 2006: Fair. The 49ers picked up Maryland tight end Vernon Davis with that #6 pick and had one of the better drafts in the league, so they’ll be young and improving under a good coach. But I don’t even know who their starting quarterback is, so they obviously won’t be that much better. I mean, I seriously don’t know, and I don’t care enough to look it up. Tim Rattay? That second-year guy, Alex Somebody? Fat Joe Montana? He could come straight from the set of his FedEx commercial.

A brief sidebar: Davis — or, as I have cleverly nicknamed him, "VD" — was called a "freak" by almost all draft pundits for his weight room feats and blazing speed, and I take offense to the liberal use of that term. Freak has two meanings and two meanings only. Before you enter high school, the word is reserved for the kid that has an extra finger, a birthmark on his face, or a lazy eye. Upon entry into high school until the end of one’s life, a freak is a woman who’s crazy in bed (high school is also the appropriate time to use "freak" as a verb). Period. When I hear Mel Kiper talk about Vernon Davis, I don’t want to picture Davis’s face coupled with Rick James’s sparkly hair from the "Superfreak" video--Gah! I just pictured it again.

Okay, back to hard-hitting analysis. The highlight of the season for third-party observers will almost certainly be the Week 5 grudge match with the Raiders. The most successful franchise in NFL history from the gayest city in America, a hard-playing young team under a great young coach versus the gay city’s dirty, angry, illegitimate younger brother, the team of (fired) Norv Turner and Randy Moss and Al Davis, a franchise whose fans look like GWAR fanatics. I’m guessing it will look like this.

What to expect in 2006: Who cares, as long as they lose to the Seahawks twice.