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.

Josh McDaniels has been fired by the Denver Broncos according to the team’s official page and Twitter account. As yet, there’s no word on an interim replacement. I’d like to think that getting pole-axed by the Raiders a few weeks ago contributed to the decision. McDaniels reportedly is considering a job with the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta.

Now that the season is over it’s time for teams around the league to cut the dead weight from their roster. So far the casualties have been minor, but before long every team out there will be handing out pink slips for a wide variety of reasons. While the act of releasing a player may seem easy to you, it can be quite the terrifying ordeal for your average general manager and/or personnel directors. That’s why we’ve devised this handy letter for front office stooges who want to part ways with a large professional football player who is simply too intimidating to be confronted directly.

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