Professor

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl.../SPK2UB92M.DTL

Mike Martz. Yeah, Mike Martz. Honest to God, Mike Martz.

And yet, of course Mike Martz. Absolutely Mike Martz. Who else but Mike Martz?

Head coach Mike Nolan declared Tuesday that he had found the antidote to designated 49ers scapegoat Jim Hostler, and it is the man who is at best the Bill Nye the Science Guy of offensive coordinators and at worst a preposterous fit for the team he is about to join.

In other words, this makes little sense, which is why it makes perfect sense. After all, these guys did give us Scot "The Big Trigger" McCloughan last week as an inflatable general manager and expected us to buy it.

But never mind that for a minute. Let's consider Martz, who has over the life of his career become one of those guys who is known only by his full name - not Mike, not Martz, but MikeMartz.

MikeMartz's history is that of a coordinator and head coach who operates independently from the realities of that day's game. He has his plays, and he runs them as the whim strikes him more than what the situation requires. As a head coach, he burned time outs like jah sticks, used the clock as though he were a baseball manager and fell in love with his own wackiness. As a coordinator, he treated the running game like the punting game - something you do only when you have to, and he operated a system that required a strong pocket passer.

And what does he have in San Francisco? One running back, no wide receivers, a tight end with a wide receiver's desires and a linebacker's hands and two quarterbacks who treat the sanctity of the pocket in wildly differing ways.

So he seems like a perfectly dreadful fit for what the 49ers have - either a bad idea for all the right reasons, or a good idea for all the wrong reasons, but just a bad match.

But wait, there's more. After all, these are the 49ers, and with them, there's always more.

A week ago, when asked about this very subject, MikeMartz was dismissed by Trig as a candidate for the very job he was hired for Monday. He just wasn't a bona fide candidate, period. And that made sense, for all the reasons given above.

But suddenly, he went from not a candidate to the guy, the football equivalent of Dennis Kucinich as the Republican nominee for president.

Thus, what we have here is more of the scattershot, there's-logic-in-here-somewhere management style that the 49ers have down to a T. Next to this, the Raiders' weird indecision about the marriage of Lane Kiffin and Rob Ryan seems like a faculty meeting at MIT.

Now in fairness to MikeMartz, he is a hypercreative play caller, and one of the many complaints with the 49ers' offense is that it was predictably bland, drab and awful. He didn't get his weirdo reputation in St. Louis until after he got his genius reputation in St. Louis. Plus, and this is a big plus, his hiring is an admission that the 49ers cannot continue to pound the ball with Gore and call it an offense.

Internally, MikeMartz had connections to both Ted Tollner and Norv Turner, as well as Nolan. Thus, Mikey and Trig's initial reluctance to consider Martz were quickly eroded.

But there remains the nagging problem of talent - namely, the near-bankruptcy of the kind of players that made MikeMartz's offense work in St. Louis. After all, he looked brilliant when he had Kurt Warner and Isaac Bruce and Torry Holt and Ricky Proehl and Marshall Faulk and Orlando Pace, but didn't look nearly so swell with Jon Kitna and Roy Williams and Mike Furrey and Mike Williams and Kevin Jones and Jeff Backus.

And now he's got Alex Smith and Darrell Jackson and Arnaz Battle and Ashley Lelie and Frank Gore and Joe Staley. And one year to make them all look like Warner and Bruce, et al, or find something better.

His offense runs directly counter to the offense Nolan believes is best, which means that only two things can happen as a result of their collaboration: One, Nolan leaves MikeMartz alone as an accommodation to his own perilous situation; or two, they butt heads routinely. One would think this a recipe for Mike Ditka-Buddy Ryan separatist fighting, but Nolan is a desperate man, willing to leave the offense in someone else's control, and as an added bonus to have the Smith problem largely taken from his hands

But hey, these are collaborative times under the red-and-gold big top. Mikey's getting along with Trig, and Trig likes MikeMartz, and besides, MikeMartz needs the job. Given that Bob LaMonte is the agent for both Nolan and MikeMartz, everyone ends up happy.

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