2000 Season Wrap

All Good for Niner-Haters

January 9, 2001 (NHS) -- It's the evil catchword for any rebuilding team, and it signifies the absolute lowest of expectations. As a new era of football dawned in the year 2000, it was a word that gave the 49er coaching staff a tangible goal and gave Niner fans hope.

"Improvement."

Yes, folks, that's how far the mighty have fallen. For the Niners, 2000 wasn't about "Super Bowl", or "division title", or "playoffs", or even ".500". It was all about "improvement." So long as the team showed some sort of spark, any sort of indication that it was getting just a little better as the season progressed, it would be enough to rubber-cement the creaking wheels of the Niner bandwagon to the axle for at least one more year.

Of course, it's easy for the wheels to keep turning when the load the wagon is pulling is lighter than normal. Yes, despite much-ballyhood "sellouts" at the House That Joe Built throughout the season, a quick glance at the 3Com crowds showed that, more often than not, a lot of the "49er faithful" were finding other things to do on their fall Sundays instead of rooting on the merlot and cheddar. There were the bitter die-hards who showed up every week to study the carnage and think back wistfully to the good ol' days of Ronnie and Keena, of course, but aside from that, the standard clingers-on that hopped on the wagon in 1981 were nowhere to be found as the new millennium dawned by the Bay.

Those who did show up usually were gone by halftime after being treated to much of the same ugly performances that became the norm last season. Stacked with rookies and newcomers, the 49er defense often looked as if it wasn't capable of stopping a good powderpuff team, as mediocre opponents rolled up big yardage and big points with regularity. On the other side of the ball, it was a slightly different story, as the West Coast Offense not surprisingly took a licking and kept on ticking. Jeff Garcia, touted by Bill Walsh as a "top-ten" QB coming into the season, made the old man look smart for once by compiling one of the season's best QB passer ratings en route to a surprise Pro Bowl berth.

The Garcia story, of course, underscores the continuing problem with the 49ers -- they cannot seem to escape being drastically overrated by fans and, especially, the idiot media. Garcia is a microcosm of the 49er problem -- he's a player that in reality is nothing close to special, but to read the papers and hear the talk shows, he's the next in the great line of 49er Hall Of Fame quarterbacks. Garcia's success in the passer rating system -- his 2000 rating of 97.6 is higher than both Joe Montana's and Steve Young's career ratings -- begs the question: are the Niners simply JUST THAT GOOD that they keep finding great quarterbacks, or does the offensive system make the quarterback and his statistics look better than he really is?

When you consider that 49er backup QBs have usually put up impressive stats, it becomes apparent that the rinky-dink offensive system serves to overinflate their quarterbacks' stats -- which, in the process, serves to make the player overrated. The other thing that pumped up the stats of Garcia and the rest of the Niners was their typical garbage schedule. The fortunes of the team may have changed over the last five years, but the schedule hasn't -- it was ranked in the bottom third of the NFL in terms of difficulty yet again, and Garcia took full advantage by performing well against the dreck of the league. And as the media began to overrate Garcia, so they began to overrate the Niners themselves.

The media managed to discount the weak schedules when the Niners were good, so it's no surprise that they took no notice of it again in 2000. The 49ers played only six games against winning teams, and lost them all. Yet, all we heard about, from both the media and the team itself, was how much the Niner defense was "improving" down the stretch. The Niners gave up 7 points to 7-9 Kansas City, and then 6 points to 4-12 Atlanta (with the second-worst offense in the League), and suddenly the media started trumpeting the "young, up-and-coming Niner defense". A shutout of 5-11 Chicago (with its 23rd-ranked offense) sent the Bay Area press into a tizzy, before Denver thankfully came along and dropped 38 points on SF to knock everyone back to reality as the season ended. There's no telling what kind of pablum we would have heard if Denver hadn't exposed the Niners -- given the media sheep, there would have probably been predictions of a Super Bowl run in 2001 for Frisco.

Instead, the Niners were bad enough to be garbage but good enough to play themselves out of a great draft spot, making 2000 a stellar year for the Niner-haters who are fighting the good fight. Not only did the team stink, and not only did they lose 10 games, but they didn't end up with a top pick that they could parlay into a bunch of lower picks, like they did last year. No, the Niners will probably be able to end up with one good player in the upcoming draft, but they still have lots of needs, and with the cap still weighing heavily upon them, all those needs won't be filled in the upcoming offseason, supposedly the third of a "three-year rebuilding process".

One thing the Niners don't need is another wide receiver, as Jerry Rice is finally stepping aside under the laughable guise of being a salary cap casualty. Rice, whose last truly effective season was in 1996, said early in the year that he wanted to go elsewhere in 2001 to pad his records -- er, step aside and let the younger Niner receivers develop. In reality, his proclamation was a preemptive strike against the team, which figured to slash his tired, overpaid ass after the year anyway. After all, they did the same with Montana, Lott and Craig, and Fifi figured to be no different. Hilariously, in Rice's final game as a 49er at Candlestick, his protégé, Terrell Owens, overshadowed Rice by setting an NFL record with 20 catches, thereby proving that if you throw someone enough dink passes, they'll catch a lot of passes. Of course, no one has ever figured out that the same concept has applied to Rice throughout his career, so pencil Owens in the Hall now, too.

Owens was a story in and of himself as he created quite a furor in the team's meaningless early season win over the dilapidated Cowboys. Supposedly "trying to spark his team", Owens defied the Dallas players by running out to the Cowboy logo at midfield in Texas Stadium following touchdowns not once but twice, finally prompting Dallas DB George Teague to send the showboating Owens sprawling on his ass for his insolence. Owens later defended his actions, telling Niner coach Steve Mariucci "I've gotta be me and you can't change that" or some other drivel to that effect, which further embarrassed the squad. Like a simpering child, Owens finally got the message that his actions were less than classy and apologized, but the damage was done.

Given Owens' clown act, the team's oh-so-light penalty from the league office for their heinous salary cap violations, and Rice's transparent spin job on his imminent departure, things were pretty normal at Niner Central this season from a class standpoint. Yes, the team that supposedly cornered the market on class in the 1980s continues to roll on and do tactless, idiotic things, but what would you expect from this franchise? Their "improvement" on the field in 2000 was an illusion, as was their "improvement" off the field. All told, despite appearances, the Niners are still going nowhere, and still being led by talentless schmucks like Steve Mariucci, who still has yet to add any sort of meaningful win to his resume. A cheesy offensive system and a Pop Warner schedule might obscure their problems somewhat, but until they figure out how to beat a winning team -- which they've only done once in two years and haven't done with any consistency since 1994 -- they'll continue to wallow at the bottom of the NFL. Which, of course, is just fine with us.

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