written by Lowell Cohn.
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20091221/NEWS/912219955?Title=Singletary-s-magical-thoughts-on-Smith
This is the story of the two Alex Smiths. The first Alex Smith is the guy we see on the field. Sometimes he’s not so good. Like in Philly he wasn’t so good.
In Philly he threw three picks and he kept fleeing to his right and hurling the ball out of bounds. OK, Alex, we know you have that out-of-bounds play down pat. How about completing a pass instead?
The Alex we saw on the field — call him On The Field Alex — had a passer rating of 42.3. The week before that, On The Field Alex had a rating of 59.7. Those are bad ratings. At a certain point you ask a fundamental question. If a guy gets enough bad ratings, does that make him a bad quarterback?
Coach Mike Singletary doesn’t see it like that. As far as I understand it, Singletary makes a distinction between On The Field Alex and Ideal Alex. Ideal Alex can make all the throws and has composure up the wazoo and would never crumble and shrink in Philly like On The Field Alex definitely did.
I want to expand on this theme if you’ll bear with me. Sometimes we read about athletes — anybody really — getting into trouble. The athlete may shoot off a gun at a nightclub and later, when his agent and the team tell him to apologize, he says, “That wasn’t me shooting the gun. I don’t know what came over me.”
I am not saying Smith ever would shoot a gun, or go to a club, for that matter. I’m talking about a person’s real self. The gun-toting athlete does not want us to define him by his actions, although the best gauge of a person is his actions, believe me. The athlete in question wants us to define him by a vague concept of his ideal self — great guy, kind to little kids, plays video games, never actually committed homicide or threw his mother out the window. Are you with me?
I call this “magical thinking,” the notion that mere ideas transcend real actions. The Niners engage in magical thinking with Smith. Singletary certainly does. He needs to. He needs to believe Smith has arrived, or is pulling into the station. He defines Smith by what he is sure Smith can do, what he believes Smith will be. But he refrains from judging Smith by his actions — what he does or does not do on the field. Magical thinking can be comforting to a coach.
Take what happened with the Eagles game. Immediately afterward, Singletary said Smith didn’t play well. He soft-pedaled Smith’s performance by saying that even great quarterbacks have bad games. Urgent question: When did Smith’s name get mentioned in the category of great quarterbacks?
A day later, at his Monday news conference, Singletary changed direction: “I owe (Alex) an apology.” Singletary said this in his opening remarks. He said Smith played better than he thought. He changed his mind after watching the film and contemplating the game. So, get this — immediately following the game Singletary had a visceral reaction: Smith wasn’t so hot. A day later, he revised his reaction: Smith was pretty hot.
In this world, the visceral reaction usually is the correct reaction. The later reaction is a fib you tell yourself.
Singletary spent much of his news conference justifying Smith, explaining away his three first-half picks, explaining away what you saw and, more importantly, what Singletary himself saw. Singletary became a Smith apologist, telling us to believe in Ideal Alex and to disregard On The Field Alex.
“It’s a shame to me that every time a quarterback throws an interception, that automatically it’s him. ‘The guy is off. Well, he stinks.’ When I look at the film, I am very encouraged. I don’t have a situation where I’m sitting back thinking, ‘Man, I thought Alex was making progress and now I don’t.’ I’m not there at all.”
Singletary is supportive of Smith. And Smith needs support — Mike Nolan didn’t support him. Nolan crushed him. With support, Smith might turn into a pretty good quarterback. We don’t actually know one way or another.
But something else happened at the news conference and you should know about it. I asked Singletary if Smith will be his starting quarterback next season.
Here’s what the coach said: “I think right now the thing that I want to do before I start talking about who’s going to do this and who’s going to do that, I want to finish the season. That’s the first thing I want to do before there is a temptation to start thinking about, ‘Well, who’s going to do this? What changes do I need to make there and to start meeting with (general manager) Scot McCloughan about this and that?’ I can’t do that. We’ve got to focus on the two games that we have left. We’re going to finish this season and let everything else take care of itself.”
Singletary will support Smith, but only so far. Singletary will support Smith hoping On the Field Alex can merge with Ideal Alex. I believe — I’m pretty sure — Smith will be the Niner quarterback next season. And I believe he will improve — how much, I don’t know. No one knows. It’s not like the 49ers have an alternative, and it would be a disaster to draft a quarterback. That would set the 49er program back years.
Which means the 49ers don’t want the uncertainty of starting all over yet again with someone new. They’d prefer to stick with the uncertainty of Alex Smith. When choosing between uncertainties, the uncertainty you know is always better than the uncertainty you don’t know.
[ Edited by foamingatdamouth on Dec 30, 2009 at 6:18 PM ]