Now comes the difficult part for the San Francisco 49ers, the two parts of their game they have never developed, not under Bill Walsh and not under George Seifert.
Scoreboard watching and hoping for the kindness of strangers.It is one thing to hand over a game, which the 49ers did on Saturday against the Falcons. Due in large part to Dexter Carter's Six Minutes Of Hell (and that will be the last time we bring it up, honest), the boys are now in the unfamiliar and most unenviable position of having to root for other teams to do the work they could not do themselves.
The work? Well, it isn't to win the NFC West. The New Orleans Saints having announced their lack of interest in the chase, the 49ers only have to attend each to their final three games to win the division. Well, that's not entirely true. They have to attend all three and win one, which seems easy enough. Especially now that the Saints have decided to become the Rams.
But the 49ers didn't put "win the division" at the top of their in-basket. They have far loftier goals, and right now, they have become rather more of a longshot to reach them.
Reason: Home-field advantage. They don't have it, and unless the New York Giants turn all Sainty between now and the end of the regular season, they won't get it. And the home-field advantage matters, a lot. As much as, and perhaps even more than, mere talent.
Right now, the 49ers are two games behind the Giants - the game they actually trail in your afternoon standings, and the game they have lost to the Giants in the tiebreaker system. They are also a tiebreaker behind Dallas, the team most folks still believe is the class of the conference, Leon Lett or no Leon Lett.
That means that if it's Giants-49ers, the big game will be played at Giants, not 49ers, Stadium. Not on the soggy Candlestick fens, but the quarry-with-yard-markers of The Meadowlands. And trust me, venue matters.
And if it's Cowboys-49ers, they'll be playing at Texas Stadium. Go back to 1978, the first year that more than four teams got into the postseason in each conference. The lesson you are about to learn is that the farther you go into the postseason, the more important the home-field advantage. Here are the numbers:
In the wild-card or first-round games, the home team is 24-16, a .600 percentage. In the divisional finals, the numbers grow to 44-16, .733. And the conference finals, 21-9, or .700.
Thus, for the 49ers to regain the initiative, they have to find common cause with New York's next two opponents - New Orleans (feh) and Phoenix (double feh). They also have to find it in their hearts to root on the Jets next week and Washington the week after when those teams face up to the Cowboys. And on the final day of the year, when the Giants play the Cowboys, they have to root for the team with the poorer record, in case it makes a bit of difference between now and then.
And they have to run the table against Detroit, Houston and Philadelphia. Yes, the time has come to root for others, to pay attention to the things that are not in their control. Coaches everywhere are taking hemlock at the very thought of it.
Like every other team in the NFL, the 49ers have been told since they were first weaned from their first assistant coaches that they can only concentrate on their own tasks, that they cannot worry about what they cannot control. Put the blinders on and pull the sled, my little Lapland deer, and let the rest of the world do what it must.
That philosophy works fine if you're in first. Nothing in the rear-view mirror can hurt you, with the possible exception of the Highway Patrol.
Not now, though, and not here. The 49ers must use their best mental skills to try to affect the world they cannot touch. And history shows us they aren't very good at it.
Their last experience with this sort of thing was 1991, when they entered the 16th week of the year needing the Falcons, Lions, Eagles and Raiders to win to have a chance to root for the Redskins to beat the Eagles the following week and get into the playoffs. It took a lot of rooting that weekend, but the 49ers were dedicated to the task.
They went 0-5. You have to emit a whole lot of negative karma to miss them all, and the 49ers did.
Indeed, the last time they rooted for something that actually happened for them was in the 15th week in 1986, when they needed not only to beat New England but for the Rams (yes, they used to be good) to lose to Miami. Which they did, 37-31, in overtime when Dan Marino (remember him?) hit Mark Duper (remember him?) with a 20-yard touchdown pass three minutes into the extra period.
That loss allowed the 49ers to face the Rams head-to-head at Candlestick with the winner taking the division and the loser getting Washington in the first round. Not that it ultimately mattered, mind you - the 49ers won and got the bye, while the Rams got beat by the Redskins. The bye was so important to the 49ers that they went to the Meadowlands the next week and got squashed by the Giants, 49-3.