"The Bigger Problem"

Submissions from our readers

By no means is the NHS the only collection of people that hate the 49ers. There's a great big world of Niner-hating out there, and this section is intended to reach that bigger voice of those beyond affiliation with our little site. So enjoy the following, completely written by readers who sent us e-mail saying they would like us to post it.

Contents:

A story about 49er fans
B.A.S.S.
Top 10 overrated 49ers
49er math

A Story

Once upon a time there were a group of Niner fans having a tailgate party before a game. The wine was chilled, the sushi tasy, and the lustful tales of victory plenty. The courage of these individuals was evident as they explained that they have been ardent Niner fans since 1981. It was amazing to watch how these folks went out on a limb and speak of the years in which they were faithful Niner fans (1981-present).

As the wine flowed among the Niner faither, a question arose from an outsider. "Who was the QB for the Niners before Montana?" asked the voice. The group sat in silence.

The voice spoke again, "Name the offensive line of the present Niner team." Again the group seemed dumbfounded. Again and again the voice asked basic questions to the Niner crowd regarding the personnel and strategy of their beloved team. Time and time again the Niner fans sat in bewilderment.

Finally, one fan rose to his feet to address the crowd and appear to answer the voice. The Man spoke, "Who cares about the details of the Niners, isn't it cool that they win?"

With that a cheer roard from the crowd and the questioning voice disappeared.

Ah, yes, the Niner fan. If the Niners are winning you are a fan, if not, you have some other things to do. Very little knowledge of the team or the game does not stop the "Niner faithful."

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Forty-Niner Fans

Just a symptom of a larger problem?

By now, virtually everyone who has ever heard of the game of football has been subjected to at least some sort of pro-San Francisco 49er propaganda, be the simple, classic "Joe Montana is the best quarterback, ever," to the more recent creation, "Bill Walsh is the greatest football mind ever, a genius, and he will bring us back to the Super Bowl." It is all over the place, and unless you have the attention span or intelligence of an eggplant, you have experienced it.

But interestingly, this "Holier than thou and everybody else" mentality is not limited to football. Indeed, the entire Bay Area seems to suffer from an affliction that we will call, for lack of a better term, Bay Area Superiority Syndrome, or BASS.

Think back. When was the last time anyone said anything bad about San Francisco? Even if something does go wrong, like a garbage strike, a fire, or an earthquake, they don't even mention it. They go out of their way to talk downgrade other cities, making comments like "Well, it could be worse. We could have been living in (anywhere outside of a 50 mile radius from the Transamerica Tower)."

This BASS-influenced belief system is most evident than in the nickname of San Francisco itself. For years, the denizens of the Bay Area have referred to lovely, fog shrouded S.F. as "The City."

"The City."

Simple. Easy to remember. And just a little bit vain, wouldn't you think?

Since when is San Francisco "The City?" How did it earn this title? Did it win a race? Was it covered in fog for so long that the residents forgot there was an outside world?

No. Actually, we have the upper class to thank.

"The only people who really call it The City are Marin County people making six figures who ask their spouses on Friday nights, 'Shall we stay home and count our money, or shall we go to The City?'" explained a long time San Jose resident and staff member at one of the major newspapers in the area, who allowed himself to be quoted on condition of anonymity.

Indeed, that audacity was reflected on the January 28, 1996 Letters to the Editor page of the San Francisco Examiner, where a very nice, BASS-inflicted lady with a cool hyphenated last name denounced all other nicknames and insisted that "San Francisco is known as "The City" all over the world." Personally, the premise composed by out editor friend seems much more plausible.

But that doesn't stop the Examiner from throwing out the capital T and C at every opportunity. Throughout any section of the paper you will find references to The City, even in instances where it is clear that a person being quoted isn't using the words in that context. For example, when one might say, "Gee, this garbage strike will really stink up the city," or "Willie Brown is going to ruin the city," you can rest assured that an editor afflicted with BASS, will insert the appropriate capital letters.

But it doesn't stop there. The only nickname you can use is "The City." God forbid you should say, for example, "Frisco," the utterance of which would likely get you thrown off of the top of that same Transamerica Tower by BASS-crazed loonies. So what is the answer? How can we rid ourselves of this problem?

We can't.

BASS is a serious disease, and there is no cure being researched at this time. In fact, there is no idea of what causes it. The only thing ruled out has been the water, as Southern California has been stealing it for years and showing no ill effects. All that we, as non-BASS inflicted victims, can do is promote true thought on the issues of BASS-driven thoughts, and be patient with those who suffer. The next time you hear a poor Niner fan stutter helplessly when he tries to say Joe Montana and Steve Young at the same time in response to your question of who the greatest quarterback of all time is, smile at them and perhaps say a little prayer for them. Remember, they are not at fault, for they know not what they do.

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Top 10 most overrated San Francisco 49ers

John Taylor - Wide Receiver - Taylor's entire reputation and career is based on one national television performance on Monday against the Rams. The fact that the performance came against the Rams is enough to warrant Taylor's inclusion. The fact that Taylor wouldn't go over the middle in a cab fortifies the reasoning. Additionally, he was so injury-prone during his career that if he had a nightmare in which he got hit, he woke up with a strained groin, hamstring or shoulder.
Jack Reynolds - This "Hacksaw" was more like a butter knife. To say he lacked speed would be akin to saying Michael Jordan is a pretty decent scorer. If he had stayed with the Rams, he would have gone down in history as a horrible linebacker, as a 49er he became a legend, due in great part to the San Francisco media.
Brent Jones - In any other system on the planet, Jones is lucky to be a practice squad player. He goes to the 49ers and he suddenly becomes "The best tight end in football". He is slow, he cannot block and he cannot run a true pass pattern, only those joke patterns that the 49ers run.
Roger Craig - Craig became the first running back to rush for x amount of yards and catch passes for x amount of yards in a season. The 49ers are famous for inventing statistical "firsts" to justify their players' abilities. He wasn't good enough to be called a great or even a good running back, so they came up with another category. He is another player whose reputation was built on one Sunday afternoon in 1988 when he ran for some yards against the Rams. He stepped really high and broke some tackles and thus, he was entrenched into 49er lore.
Merton Hanks - Old "Rubberneck" is good for one thing, posing with Steve Young in a Sports Illustrated commercial. Can't defend the pass, can't defend the run and certainly can't defend the lenghth of his neck. Just another case of San Francisco media going bananas about a guy because of a bandana and a long neck.
Fred Dean/Louie Kelcher - Simply another case of lousy players coming over from another team and benefitting from success and media attention. Kelcher was slow and Dean couldn't defend the run with shotgun.
Randy Cross - Another 49er pretty-boy. Retiring 49ers don't actually vanish, they go on to television careers. He was a steroid monster and a bad college player at UCLA.
Freddie Solomon - See John Taylor. Had no hands and couldn't, or wouldn't, go over the middle. Another product of a system.
Jerry Rice - On any other team in the NFL, the USFL, the Arena Football League or the WLAF, the guy is a nobody. He has average speed and he prospers because the 49ers set so many illegal picks for him that it's pathetic. The NFL is afraid of the 49ers and Rice has seen what would have been an average five year career turn into a misleading career of big numbers. The Pro Football Analysis Corporation did a study and found that Rice either drops or fumbles 1.5 times as many passes as he catches. That stat says it all.
Bill Walsh - See the Stanford Cardinal. Couldn't coach in college and he couldn't coach in pros. Obviously the 49ers have missed him since they have only won two Super Bowls since his departure. In addition, he deserves to be on the list because he has been instrumental in propagating a system that has ruined the game of professional football.

Special Honorable Mention: Steve Young (That monkey jumped right back on his back after his choke in "The Game" against the Packers this season; Joe Montana (Deserves to be on, if for no other reason, his horrible television analysis and the embarassing retirement celebration he had in San Francisco); All 49er offensive linemen (Those leg whips are starting to wear thin and they are starting to injure too many players.)

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49er Math

Once upon a time, there was math. You remember -- when you were a kid, you sat in a little desk in school and added, subtracted, and performed calculations according to a system of rules you slowly learned was called "math".

Then, sometime after my generation, there came along "new math", which I never understood. How could there be anything "new" to math? The rules, as far as I could tell, were unchangeable: 1 + 1 = 2, 2 > 1, 1 = 1, and so on -- where's the wiggle room? Sure, even in my day there were fundamental questions, such as, "Why is 6 afraid of 7?" but such mysteries were eventually answered to my satisfaction, and the system worked. So I decided not to bother even trying to understand new math and bumped along using, well, "old math".

I'm grown up now and I don't do much math other than dividing up my humble paycheck (again proving the rules of math -- that once you reach 0, it is no longer divisible). Today, what I do more of than math is watch football. But, if you think about it, there's a lot of math to football. Why, without math, we wouldn't be able to evaluate that one team's final score was greater than the other, and therefore that team the winner. Math even helps us pore over statistics, records, and many, many other life-or-death football matters.

But just like new math came along to throw into confusion my grasp on old math, there's a breed of football numbers that throws my peaceful understanding of "football math" out of whack.

I call it "49er Math".

Now, you may think you've never heard of this, but trust me, if you are a football fan, you've been exposed to 49er Math on infinite occasions -- and the scary part is that you didn't even realize it.

Consider, if you will, these examples:

* June 2001: The Sporting News says Ricky Watters "has been a part of many championship teams."

* January 1998: The New York Times says the 49ers are "winners of five Super Bowls, the most in the league."

You may disagree, but as far as I can tell, the most plausible explanation for such statements is 49er Math. My paradigm is that in 49er Math, a number associated with the 49ers is greater than the corresponding number in the traditional math you and I grew up with.

So while we might think that Watters' career total of one championship with the 49ers would count as "one", apparently The Sporting News applied 49er Math to that 1 and reached the plurality, a result greater than 1 ("many championships"). And as you can see, the esteemed New York Times' application of 49er Math turns the 49ers' number of Super Bowl wins (5) into more than the Cowboys' lesser, traditional little five.

Of course, by no means do I assert my hypothesis is the only correct one. Another theory, advanced by a colleague of mine, is that 49er Math holds that every 49er team since 1981 is simply considered, by definition, a "championship team". Ergo, the proper characterization of Watters' career is that in three years in San Francisco, he played on three championship teams. While this theory does explain the assumption of greatness attributed to every 49er and why Chris Berman picks the 49ers to win the Super Bowl every year, I personally think it is too broad in its application.

In addition to 1 > 1 and 5 > 5, 49er Math can also lead to the possibility of a 49er number being greater than a traditional number that by all appearances seems grossly larger. For example, in June 1999, ESPN asked "why we let John Elway rise above" Steve Young, among others, in greatness, concluding bitterly that "Elway doesn't have the championships, and Elway doesn't have any claim to 'Greatest Quarterback Ever'."

In this scenario, ESPN's assertion that Young was greater than Elway contained the premise that the 49er number 1 (the number of championships won by the Niners with Steve Young as the starting quarterback) is greater than Elway's seemingly double amount of 2 championships. (We should also note that same ESPN article concluded that Joe Montana was the 'Greatest Quarterback Ever', obviously making the 49er 4 greater than, say, Terry Bradshaw's 4, Bart Starr's 5, or even Otto Graham's 7.)

This leads to a final quandary. See, while math is a system of fundamentals that build on each other to create a system of logic, it seems that 49er Math does not require that characteristic. For example, when comparing Jerry Rice to anyone, 49er Math holds that you compare numbers, conclude that Rice has the most receiving numbers, and is therefore the best player in history. However, when considering Montana, you don't employ this comparison of numbers because Montana evidently does not need to have the most numbers, stats, or championships to be declared the best.

Furthermore, 49er Math seems to ignore categories of numbers whimsically, including things like touchdowns per game, comparisons to peers of the same era, or anything which shows Don Hutson was clearly better than Rice.

By now, hopefully you agree that -- although we can't define it precisely at this point -- clearly, there is something rotten in the state of Denmark, or at least the city of Bristol. For now, let us agree on a working definition for the term "49er Math" so that others may be able to recognize it more readily in the future:

49er Math is a system of numbers that is used in a way contrary to the laws of traditional mathematics in order to justify the speaker's claim(s) to the 49ers, person, or entity associated with the 49ers as being The Best Ever.

Should you experience a 49er Math sighting, I urge you to contact your local Air Force branch, or at least email the NHS (nhs@49erhaters.com), which has graciously agreed to catalogue the phenomena. Working together, perhaps one day we, too, can understand the inner workings of the minds of the 49er Bandwagon -- if we dare.

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