Danny O'Neil Message to Mike Singletary: Keep your pants on

Tag : pants

Mike Singletary had one heck of an audition Sunday in SanFrancisco. So captivating, in fact, that it's sure to land him ajob down the road.
That job will be in a Coors Light commercial, however. He has thatact down pat.
It's the part about being an NFL head coach that could use somework. It didn't even take a whole game to reveal his shortcomings.He reportedly dropped his pants at halftime when addressing histeam to make a point that his team was getting its tail kicked. ...
In the second half, Singletary sent one of his most talentedplayers to the locker room after a personal-foul penalty followedby what appeared to be a nonchalant walk off the field. That wasfine, but then came a postgame address that began with an apologyover how his team played and continued to draw a line in the sandthat he would rather play with 10 players than have a guy less than100 percent committed.
"Cannot win with them," he said. "Cannot coach with them. Cannot doit."
See, it's a ready-made commercial. The kind that appeals to JoeSix-Pack sitting at home who loves to see a coach give his team agood blistering. And the 49ers are certainly bad enough to makesomeone yell. They haven't made the playoffs for six seasons andcounting, they've just fired a coach for the third time since 2002and the whole thing may need to be rebuilt.
But here's what that team didn't need: A coach enlarging his ownstature by belittling the players he's coaching. And that's whatSingletary did. He showed there was a new boss in town, only thenew boss has been on the staff since 2005, and he's hip-deep inresponsibility for this mess just like they are.
His performance made for great theater, Singletary up at the podiumand so mad he had to cut himself off and tell reporters he neededto stop talking. It was an old-school diatribe for the YouTubegeneration.
Singletary's former coach, Mike Ditka, said he was proud of thespeech, and 49ers fans who haven't cheered a playoff team since2002 surely thought it was about time someone started screaming. Itseems that just about everybody loved it. Everybody except the mostimportant people. That would be the guys he coached that Sundayafternoon.
A coach's primary job is to make his players better. Pulling downyour pants in front of the team and making an example of one playerin full view of everyone is more likely to make the players tuneout the coach than make those players better.
Now, this is football and there are things said and done in thelocker room that would be grounds for a lawsuit in otherprofessions. The NFL is a different world, and one of the onlybusinesses where you'd find an upstanding conscientious man in hismid-30s — someone like Chris Gray — instructed to runwind sprints after practice as a sort of corporal punishmentbecause the team wasn't working hard enough for the coach's taste.
But even in a football locker room there are lines. Cross them andyou risk losing the team. Private excoriation is one thing, publichumiliation another, whether it's in front of the team or in thepublic eye.