Or to cornily reference another, more recent, Darren Aronofsky movie: Black Swoon. However you want to painfully set it up, Mike Singletary was fired by the 49ers on Sunday night after leading the team to its tenth loss of the season, which culminated with a heated sideline exchange with Troy Smith.

Singletary’s head coaching career started on such a promising note, both for professional and entertainment purposes, with a 5-4 record as an interim coach in 2008. That encouraging start (by recent Niners standards, at least) coincided with the new classic “I want winners” press conference rant and the incident where Singletary dropped trou in the locker room at halftime to fire his team up.

In the time since, it’s been mostly giant crosses festooned around his neck, statements of absolute certitude followed closely by comic ineptitude and releasing a DVD that will show you how to be sub .500 in your everyday life. We’ll miss Singletary’s over-the-top antics and ice grilling of referees, but his departure opens up yet another vacancy for Jon Gruden to be a future failure. Odds are he’s going to get one of them.

BOOSH! That’s stone cold certitude, served Mike Singletary style, which means pantsless while losing by 30 points to the Seahawks. While Singletary has so far been an okay head coach, he’s excelled like few other in communicating through unalloyed coachspeak at all times. Being grilled by a stupid sports journalist about how Yahoo! reported that Alex Smith experienced problems getting the playcalls in from offensive coordinator Jimmy Raye? Antagonize like you never antagonized before!

No really sure what the need for the fuss is, especially when we know it was Raye’s insipid music keeping the playcalls from being heard.

[Int. NFL Combine]

Mike Singletary: Great workout, Matt, you sure are putting on quite a display.

Matt Stafford: Thanks coach, so what’s next? Want to watch me do some more keg-lifts?

Singletary: No, I think we’ve seen enough of your physical abilities. What we’re going to do is have you sit down with a friend of mine for an informal chat. How does that sound?

Stafford: Uh, sure, that sounds fine.

Singletary: Very good, follow me this way, son.

Read the rest of this entry »