49ers' Hill deserves award; Martz deserves reprimand

On Wednesday, the National Football League named Shaun Hill NFC Offensive Player of the Week for his outstanding play in the 49ers’ 35-16 win over the Rams last Sunday. No thanks to Mike Martz.

Let me back up. Martz may be a nice man and he clearly is brilliant offensively — with severe limitations — but until the Rams game his influence on the Niners was disastrous and you could make the case, when Mike Nolan was sent packing, Martz should have been kicked out with him.

I began thinking about this after former Bay Area native Shane Buettner, now living in Seattle, wrote me a discerning e-mail about Martz’s manifold football sins. Some of my ideas are direct rip-offs from Shane but he gave his blessing.

Think about Martz. He stormed into the 49ers’ headquarters before this season with a carte blanche on the offensive side. The team already had two quarterbacks: Alex Smith, who was earning big money and for better or worse had been the No. 1 pick in the draft; and Shaun Hill, a player the team liked, a player they had just awarded a big contract.

None of that was good enough for Martz. He had his own guy — J.T. O’Sullivan. No one had ever actually heard of O’Sullivan, given that he was a career backup with no credentials and no pedigree. But — and this is a big deal — Martz knew better than everyone in the league. He knew better than all the teams that had JTO but didn’t like him, even though JTO had thrown just 26 passes since 2002, his rookie year.

Of course, Martz did not immediately spring JTO on the team. For a while, he played it cool. He set up a competition in training camp. And that seemed OK. Competition is good for a football team. But the competition seemed fixed — or maybe I’m reading things into it.

First it was a competition between Smith and Hill — it’s what we expected. Then JTO popped into the mix. This was a surprise because, frankly, who in the world was JTO? All of a sudden Hill had a tired arm and he slid to No. 3. But it turns out he didn’t have a tired arm. It was an excuse for what Martz was planning.

Is “scheming” a better word? And then JTO was the No.1 guy. People gave Martz the benefit of the doubt because, remember, he’s an offensive whiz and people thought maybe, just maybe, he was brilliant enough to see something in JTO no one else in the world could see. And there was precedent around here for discovering quarterbacks. Bill Walsh saw what a gem Steve Young was although hadn’t been successful at Tampa Bay, and Walsh also understood Jeff Garcia’s fabulous talent.

As it turns out, JTO is no Young or Garcia. Or am I being harsh? But Martz being Martz made JTO the starter, which means the third-best Niner quarterback was starting in this, Nolan’s make-or-break season. Good luck with that.

Did Martz’s sins end there? No way. After installing the wrong quarterback, he proceeded to install the wrong offense. It was a pass-happy offense featuring long passes, slow-developing pass plays, entirely wrong for a so-so offensive line and a quarterback who routinely dropped the ball like a guy with Vaseline on his fingers.

It is to Mike Singletary’s credit that he immediately did two things when he took over:

1) He insisted on playing the correct quarterback, Hill;

2) He insisted Martz put in a lower-risk offense. You wonder why Nolan never did this. Obviously, he’s not as strong as Singletary.

All of which means halfway into the season, the Niner offense finally gives the impression of being appropriate, of being economical, safe, yet interesting. No thanks to Martz.

For more on the world of sports in general and the Bay Area in particular go to the Cohn Zohn at cohn.pressdemocrat.com. You can reach Staff Columnist Lowell Cohn at 521-5486 or lowell.cohn@pressdemocrat.com.