Fire Singletary - NOW

SAN FRANCISCO - The 49ers must fire Mike Singletary.

The 49er organization should fire him this week - this minute would be better. Or the 49ers "brain trust" can wait until the end of this season. In that case, Singletary would be walking around with his coaching death warrant - no other team in the world will hire him as head coach. He will be a dead coach walking.

Do not make excuses for him. Don't say the Eagles game was close and the 49ers looked good at the end. They lost.

Don't say the offensive play calling was a joke most of the game - all those boring, unproductive Frank-Gore first-down runs. The radio guys questioned the offensive calls all night, kept saying the plays were poorly designed. Good for Ted Robinson and Gary Plummer. But Singletary hired one bad offensive coordinator and fired him and now he may have hired another. Or the new guy may be running Singletary's Neanderthal offense. Singletary is in charge and he has to go.

Don't give him the excuse that his defense couldn't stop the run. It was supposed to stop the run and he is in charge.

Don't believe it when he says the team made mistakes and they need to stop making mistakes. As usual, he said that after the game. "The more turnovers you have the less chance you have to win." Well-coached teams do not make the truckload of mistakes the 49ers always make - 15 turnovers in five games. Singletary's 49ers are a sloppy, undisciplined, poorly-coached bunch and he is the coach.

Do not believe it when people say Singletary would be OK if Alex Smith weren't such a bad quarterback. Singletary indicated after the game he was not happy with Smith's play and considered putting in David Carr. Smith is a bad quarterback and he, too, needs to get fired. His fumble that got run back for a touchdown is an indictment of his behavior under pressure. But don't give Singletary the Alex-Smith excuse. Singletary has absolute control of the 53-man roster - no general manager for this ridiculous organization - and Singletary chose Smith. For that alone he needs to get fired.

He needs to get fired because the 49ers' record is 0-5. The 49ers have good players and they still can't win a game. They have lost to two teams, Seattle and Kansas City who have fewer talented players than they do. They lost to the Eagles who are beat up and played with their backup quarterback. The team we thought the Niners were would have beaten the Eagles. A 49ers team coached by Singletary didn't stand a chance.

He needs to get fired because experts picked the Niners to win their crummy division and now they won't. A better head coach would have them in first place right now. He needs to get fired because the Niners were supposed to make progress and they have gone backward. He needs to get fired because the 49ers played the Eagles at home and, incredibly, were favored. He couldn't win anyway.

Singletary is the worst 49ers head coach since anyone can remember. Dennis Erickson, who got run out of town, at least knew offense. He had been successful in college. Mike Nolan, a figure of ridicule, knows defense and is the defensive coordinator for the Dolphins. Singletary knows nothing, can coach nothing, has expertise in nothing. You can't name a worse 49er coach in decades.

Here are some typical Singletary gems from after the loss to Philadelphia:

"We're a pretty decent football team. It's disappointing because we put ourselves in this situation and only we can get ourselves out. The best team we played so far is the San Francisco 49ers."

Isn't that typical Singletary baloney? He says nothing but makes it sound like something.

"Obviously, when you're 0-5, it can be taken many different ways. As head coach, I choose to see that we are a decent football team that hasn't given ourselves a chance to find out how good we are."

Whatever that means. You don't judge a coach on being physical or being a Hall of Famer or giving good quote. You judge a coach on wins and losses. And this man can't win. For his own good and the good of the team, the 49ers must fire Mike Singletary.

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