Thin Sliced Baloney: It’s Going To Be A Long, Long NFL Off-Season

So let me get this straight. The latest offseason NFL “rumor” I am supposed to believe is that Jim Harbaugh’s “act” is “wearing thin” with some players on the Niners?

Oh, god. Honestly? The sports media really thinks anyone with a brain is going to chase this stupid tennis ball of a “report” like an easily fooled golden retriever?

Is it wearing thin that their coach has helped get them to the NFC Championship game for three years in a row?

Is it wearing thin that you can drive drunk into a tree, during the season, go through a speedy car-wash rehab and not lose your starting job?

Is it wearing thin that no coach argues more forcefully for you to the referees (as laughable and tiresome as it may be to other fans) to the point of being a walking jackass?

Now there will be an entire round of “oh no, of course there’s no rift” stories and pushback from various Niner players, both on and off the record. There will be big splashy graphics on ESPN, and perhaps even a few utterly misleading “Breaking News” red alerts to keep this narrative “alive” for a few more days.

Okay, on one level, I get it. We ALL have to swim this ocean of non-football-playing boredom day by day. And September 1 is so far away, it’s not even a distant shore. It’s just a curved horizon of nothingness.

So why not just “throw something out there” and see if we can make through the end of the week. Then, watch, Harbaugh will get an extension as the highest paid coach in the league (or probably 2nd to Belichick) and we’ll all be “hey what happened to that thing about the… uh… act.. wearing thin… or.. uh… never mind.”

Make no mistake: the “Watching Football Season” is the best sports season we have in America. The “Talking About Football Season” is not nearly as much fun. Yet some insist it’s still better than baseball. Or basketball.

Trust me, I get the emails all the time.

I don’t quite know when, exactly, the NFL jumped into this idiotic 12-month a year obsession. It sure seems like not so long ago, we let the NFL fade into the backround for many months, and we picked it up when something meaningful happened.

Now, countdown clocks to the draft (pushed even further back into MAY, thanks to a “scheduling conflict”… yeah….) have us girding for weeks and weeks of pure non-news.

Which is how I am going to file this latest Jim Harbaugh story.

And for my inability to just let this popcorn fart in a wind tunnel – I humbly apologize. Perhaps the league and its media handmaidens, got just what they wanted.

Bastards!