Kawakami is reporting that he expects a Monta trade demand this week, and Monta is seeking permission to talk to other teams about a trade.  He reports on how Monta feels that his attempts at being a leader are being undercut by Nelson. 

The article

Shades of Webber? We have a young, talented player who Nelson rubs the wrong way ... who then gets shipped out. Of course, Nelson can't coach the resulting mess, so he follows suit.

This isn't at all similar to Jackson - Jackson's a role player at best anyway, who was overpaid and getting pretty close to over-the-hill. Losing Jackson costs us nothing. But being forced to trade Monta, especially under unfavorable circumstances?

Furthermore, giving Monta's representatives permission to find a trade is a nightmare. They have a vested interested, and that's trading Monta for a little as possible, so his next team has as much talent as possible. 

Nelson has to go. Now. It's possible that Monta doesn't want to play for the Warriors anyway because of Rowell, but if Nellie is driving Monta away, it's time to pul the trigger and try to salvage something.  That might buy us the time we need for Cohan to find a buyer so we can get rid of him.  

(No comments saying "Its Kawakami" as if that means its all b.s.  His track record on this sort of thing is actually pretty decent. Not perfect, but pretty good. Whenever he posts something predicting trouble, he's slammed by fans of the team - who never seem to apologize when he's later proven right.) 

If Monta can pout his way out of town, isn't Randolph next? We already know that Randolph and Nellie don't get along (Yes. We know. Take off the blinders and watch Randolph's body language as Nellie jerks his minutes around) so he's next. You can't get equal talent back when you're trading a disgruntled player.

The drafting of Monta and Randolph are two of the few bright spots we've experienced in the last couple of years. Are we really prepared to throw them all away?

I'm disgusted and disappointed. If this goes down, don't you know that Curry is going to start making his calendar for when he can flee, too?  This is going to get worse before it gets better. 

This isn't a predictions post. Rather, it's a ... what do we have to do, post. 

It's rare that you see a team lose to a middling team and yet hear so much enthusiasm from that team's fans, but that's the situation we're in. All of a sudden, a lot seems possible. Maybe it'll be a mirage ... but maybe not. 

That being said, we're also in a pretty deep hole. Arizona beat the Giants yesterday. That gives them three wins outside the division against decent-to-good teams ... against the Niners' zero. And they still have Detroit and Tennessee to play. Meanwhile, we still have to play Philly, while they get Carolina. 

I watched a lot of the Monday Night game last night, and Zona looked really good. A lot better than they looked against us in the opener. 

Leaving aside the game against us, it looks like Zona will be favored in 7 of their other 9 games - potentially putting them at 11-4 pending their result against us. I think that makes our game against Zona a must-win, so let's say we win it, putting them at 11-5, but we have the tiebreaker. So 11-5 gets us the division. 10-6 probably does not.

That means we need to win eight more games. Sweep the division, that's three. Detroit and Tenn, that's five. And this is where Zona's win last night really hurts ... because last week we could say, "Okay, we need to win two of Jax/Chi/Hou" ... but now winning two of those is no longer enough, but, of course, only two remain on the schedule.

That means we're going to need to, in addition to sweeping the division, in addition to sweeping Detroit and Tenn, in addition to sweeping Chicago and Jacksonville ... find another game to win. We will need to beat Indy, Green Bay, or Philly. 

And it gets worse. Zona gets GB on the last day of the season, when GB might have nothing to play for. So we might need to win TWO of indy, Green Bay, and Philly.

Kind of intimidating. On the other hand, if we can make a run of it, it should put a dent in the "NFC West is weak" talk for a while. And it's worth remembering that Arizona has been nothing if not inconsistent the last two years, so they may fall apart. Yeah, I know, that's kind of wishful thinking on our part, so I wouldn't count on it.

So the margin for error has shrunk to just about nothing. 

On the plus side, though, we might have an offense for the first time in a long time. 

One of the frustrating things about internet discussions is that anybody who tries to be a realist gets ridiculed as a naysayer. In another recent thread, for example, some of us tried to make reasoned arguments about why we're not drinking the Shaun Hill kool-aid, and "middle grounders" accused us of being the nay-sayers with as little logic as the guys saying "Shaun Hill Rullz."

This isn't an "I told you so," post, but rather it's a chance to take a look at a bad game, where we got some real unlucky breaks, and use it to help us take an honest assessment of this team. 

1) Let's start with Shaun Hill. People have wanted to hype his record while ignoring the teams he played, but here's the simple truth: it's not clear that Shaun Hill has ever beaten a good team. Hill was terrible today. I'm not even that upset by the INT, which we could have recovered from. (Anytime a ball is tipped and becomes an INT, bad luck was involved. That being said, when the ball is tipped by the intended receiver, the QB's accuracy comes into question).  But Hill just didn't get it done today. Under 50% passing. A 5.2 YPA even when you account for the long pass to Morgan (where Morgan created most of the yards after-the-catch). This was a truly bad performance. 

2) The defense. I'm less worried about this defense that some will be, after giving up 45 points, but that's partly because I didn't believe the hype. Look, Clements isn't a shut-down corner, and never has been. He's not going to magically become one at this point in his career.There will be renewed calls for Manny Lawson's head, but that's typical fan short-sightedness. No, he wasn't good today, but people were calling for his head after the preseason, praising him like mad after four games, and are going to be calling for his head again today. But he's learning a new skill set, and that's going to come in fits and starts. Freaking out about the pass-rush, against a team with a great pass-blocking OL, is scapegoating.

 I really think what happened here is that our guys got dispirited in the second quarter, and that's a real concern. Of course, it's hard for them to get their mojo back when the offense keeps putting up 3-and-outs. It would have been nie to see some veteran leadership stand up, but what this defense really needed after the bad breaks of the int and the fumble was for the offense to say "hey, we're still in this thing," and they couldn't deliver. 

I'm mostly concerned about the NT situation. If this defense can't stop the run, it's going to struggle against everybody, and the Falcons just had too much room to run wherever they wanted today. 

3) The coaching. This one hurts, because today the team looked a lot like it did when coached by Nolan. The total inability to handle adversity. I'm still digesting Kawakami's diagnosis (that Sing is getting out-tacticed by opposing coaches) which bears thinking about, but essentially we saw, today, the team that had the same personality we'd seen for the last couple of seasons. Despite Sing's exhortations, these guys got punched in the face and they didn't get back up. Now, in my opinion Sing is entitled to his rookie-coach mistakes, just like anyone else, so the whole timeout thing isn't that big a deal - no way anyone could have anticipated that crucial a blown call - but the abject failure of his coaching philosophy in this game is a cause for concern, to say the least.  

4) The lack of maturity. I'm not the only one who wants to strangle Dre Bly right now. Coffee's a rookie, so he gets a pass this game, but wow.

What I'm not worried about:

1) The run game. No, Coffee's 3.8 average isn't exciting, but the truth is we had to get away from the running game because we fell behind. 

2) Josh Morgan. After his drop last week, a lot of people seemed to be giving up on him - but anybody who puts more stock in that drop then they do in his 61 yarder is crazy. That 61-yarder was something HE created, after the catch. That's special. With Hill forced to throw long deeper because of the scoreboard, Morgan put up his best numbers of the year. This guy is a keeper, who, at the moment, is not on a team that's going to showcase his talents that well. The same will be true of Crabtree if he gets onto the field this year. As with VD last year, you have to look beyond the stats to see if they're delivering, and not just call them disappointments because of low catch totals. 

Morgan has done a lot to convince me that he's going to be one of our long-term staters at WR. 

Where do we go from here?

Maybe we should call this section "Playoffs? You want to talk to me about playoffs?"

The truth is that we can still win our division pretty easily, and earn the right to get demolished in the playoffs. And I guess that's progress. Our biggest needs right now are o-line and QB. The problem, of course, is that it's not so easy to pick a QB. With so many young QBs playing well right now, it's really easy to forget about Russell, Smith, Leinart, and Young - drafting a QB in the first round is still a very expensive crapshoot. 

I'd rather see the team focus on the lines in the first two rounds. Get me a great OT (honestly, I understand why we grabbed Crabtree, but Oher would be a shoo-in for rookie of the year if linemen could get a fair shot at those prizes). Get me a NT or a guy who can get to the QB. We've got two first round picks next year, which are both likely to be top 15. Let's solve the big problems. A quality QB may slip to the second round, let's grab him then. 

I just read a comment in another post which ended:

"No pass rusher. . . we’re dead in 2009."

I was thrown by the pessimism. I started to respond in that thread, and decided I wanted to go into a little more depth.

We had 30 sacks last year, tied for 16th in the league. That's not "no pass rush." That's the definition of a league-average pass-rush. But did you know if we got 5 more sacks last year, we would have been a top-10 team in sacks? 

All this talk about how terrible our pass-rush is, well, it's just not accurate. I know, I know sacks aren't a perfect measure of a pass-rush. But the mind-set summarized by the above quote, the pathos over letting Everette Brown get away, appears to be not justified.

Our pass defense? 12th in the league in YPA. Again - not spectacular ... but better than average. Our rush defense was 8th in the league (for all the talk of our defensive line being a disaster, it doesn't look like that from the stats). 

Our "horrible" third down defense? We allowed the first down 38% of the time. 12th in the league. 

These aren't spectacular numbers, but they pretty consistently one thing: league average, or maybe a little bit better. 

There's one area were our defense was below average (and, in turns out, below average by a lot): turnovers. We only managed 12 picks, and we only forced 12 fumbles. Those numbers put us solidly in the bottom of the league.

Remember, with all this talk, that we're really talking about a league-average, or slightly better, defense ... with the caveat that we're really not a big-play defense. (This harkens back to my draft comments, too: adding league-average players isn't going to help us much, if at all. We need big-play guys if we want to upgrade this defense.)

I think we can all remember some key drives last season when it seemed like our defense just couldn't get off the field. A quick look at the relevant statistics, however, shows that our defense wasn't really the problem.

If you want to know why we were 7-9 last year, the answer is really on the other side of the ball:  While our QB's yards-per-attempt was decent, they led the league in sacks. For half the season we were starting J.T. O'Sullivan, who put the ball on the ground or threw a pick once for every ten times he dropped back to pass. We led the league in fumbles, and were tied for 26th in interceptions thrown. 

Not counting on any improvement from running the 3-4 consistently (and we clearly looked better once we dropped the whole hybrid thing), and not counting of much larger production from Manny Lawson or Ahmed Brooks, not counting on Balmer turning into a quality player, or any improvement from the free safety position, what should we expect from our defense? 

Something a little better than league-average. 

Our offense, on the other hand, should improve just from cutting out the negative plays: we led the league in sacks allowed last year, and I've already mentioned our INT numbers.  Both of those should improve with the removal of Martz's offense and JTO. (And it's worth repeating, JTO fumbled or threw an interception approximately once for every ten times he dropped back to pass). Rachal looked like an improvement once he got onto the field, and Marvel should be an upgrade over the different guys we ran out there last year (if he can stay healthy, but if he can't, we're no worse at that position). 

I don't know what to expect when it comes into translating this into wins. A league-average team can get six wins or it can get 10 wins with a couple of good or bad bounces of the football. I do know that nobody should be writing this team off as non-competitive because of our defense. Such an opinion is simply not justified by our performance last year. 

FOOCH'S NOTE: While I know folks will disagree, I thought this was a well thought out FanPost and thought it was worth moving to the front page.  After all, the offseason consists of the draft AND free agency.  Still some questions, but there are answers out there.  And don't forget to check out our San Francisco 49ers 2009 NFL Draft Grades.

Everybody seems very down on this draft, and a few people have railed against the team leadership for not doing enough to improve this offseason. 

But I want to point something out:

At the end of the season, our weakest areas were RT, WR, QB, and PR (and on this team, the pash-rush is a combination of DL and OLB play). That was the team's checklist. 

Well, look at what we did:

RT was upgraded with Marvel Smith. If his back is healthy, he's a significant improvement at that position.

WR was improved by drafting the best player available. Heck, Crabtree might have been BPA if we drafted fourth. Think about that: we improved arguably our weakest position by drafting one of the best players in the draft. You can't ask for more than that.

A young quaterback for the future? The team made a low-risk play to add that player to the roster, and can play is smart: stash him on the bench for a year or two, let him learn properly, do everything right that they did wrong with Alex Smith. If they don't like what they see, they can cut him at little cost. He may not be the solution, but he's an fascinating possibility. This is a smart way to approach the QB position.

In other words: in three of our four positions of greatest need, the team addressed the problem by adding an appropriate player. In half of the positions of need, we improved by adding a player who's expected to be an above-average NFL player. 

And we did all that without making huge salary cap commitments, and while picking up an extra first rounder for next year. 

The team still has pass-rush concerns, but there's actually hope for improvement there as well: by getting away from the hybrid system, we should put our existing players in a better position to succeed. Balmer, when drafted, was clearly a year or two away, so we can expect to start seeing contributions from him. And the new scheme should give us a chance to see what we have in Lawson, who, thanks to injuries and misuse, is really still a question mark.

(The pass rush situation isn't just about getting the right OLB, remember. Improved D-line play should help free up our existing OLBs to be more effective.) 

So not only did we improve in 3 of 4 areas of need, it's not totally unreasonable to think that fourth area of need will be improved this year, too. Plus we have two first-round picks next year to fix whatever doesn't work.

 The team still needs impact defensive players. Sack-machine pack rushers are very expensive in the free agent market, and you tend not to find them in the second round. If the team likes what it sees out of Davis, maybe it's not a QB we go for with those first rounders, maybe we can try to trade up for a sack machine next year. We'll certainly have a much better sense of what we still need after having our team spend a full year under the new coach. 

What the team didn't do is pick up a defensive player who we can all get excited about. I thing that's were the whining about Brown is coming from. Whether or not he ends up being that good, he's a player who we could all get excited talking about. See past year's fan enthusiasm about Jay Moore or Joe Cohen.

But this team was more than a year away from a championship at the end of the season, and we took good steps forward since then. I don't see what everyone is complaining about.