In the first week of my Clarkdogg Football League playoffs, my team, the Bean Counters, had to play.  The Counters finished third in the regular season standings (second in total points), and as a result, had the best record of any team that had to play in the first round.  My opponent in the first round was my wife's Fighting Ewoks team who barely slid into the playoffs when her team tied for the sixth best record, but managed to continue her season because she had around one hundred points more than BoomGoestheDynamite.  One would have to admit that seems like a pretty fair tie breaker.  In my playoff match up something happened that has never happened in five seasons of CFL fantasy football, two teams tied.  There have been occasions when games were extremely close, even one game this season where the final tally was so close that when Bertrand Berry was later credited with an assisted sack in the middle of the week, the final outcome changed.  This was even closer, the Counters and Ewoks tied.  In a playoff game, no less.

This was not unprecedented.  In the 2002 Clarkdogg League Baseball playoffs, the Bean Counters tied the Drunken SOBs in the first round of the playoffs.  Yahoo! broke the tie by, get this, which team had the lowest team ERA for the week.  How Yahoo! fantasy sports came to determine that was the most important statistical category, I will never know.  However, the randomness of that tie breaker prepared me for how the Ewoks got to play in round two this season, while my team, with its much more impressive regular season finished the season in the losers bracket.  Touchdowns.  That was it.  Touchdowns, by a margin of four-to-three, gave my wife life in the playoffs.  Personally, in a likely selfish assessment, thought it should go to the team who performed better in the regular season.  If Yahoo! was the WBC, the heavyweight champ would have to relinquish his belt after the challenger fought him to a draw and the judges determined that the challenger landed one more uppercut during the fight.  Anyway, my bitterness basically wore off when it became clear my team would have been smoked during the second round.

So, when the 49ers idiotically claimed victory against the St. Louis Rams on Saturday, the idea of tie breakers was already fresh on my mind.  Prior to last week, it was easy to determine who would win the "Reggie Bush sweepstakes."  The Houston Texans (one win) and San Francisco 49ers (two) had the two worst records in the league and were playing each other in the season finale.  If Houston lost that game, they would get Bush fair and square and if the Niners lost, they would get Bush by having the same record as Houston and losing to them head-to-head.  When Houston inexplicably won in week fifteen, the 49ers route looked even easier.  Until their win against the Rams really jumbled things up.

Should S.F. lose on Sunday, the Texans could be the fifth team to finish the season with three wins.  No head-to-head matchups could definitively decide a cluster such as this, so the likely deciding factor will be strength of schedule.  Unlike the BCS where schedule strength is a plus, the NFL draft system looks at the lowest SOS.  Basically, the team who does equally bad against worse competition is considered the lesser team and is rewarded with a better draft slot.  That actually seems logical.  Unfortunately, it is bad for my team.

As far as I am concerned, if the 49ers are going to be bad, I want them to be the worst.  I mean, if you are going to do something, do it all the way.  It gives me no consolation that the NFL will view my Niners as the fourth worst team in the league (for those curious, Green Bay has the worst SOS and would get the top pick), in fact it makes me madder than if they had equalled the 1976 Buccaneers record of futility.  In fact, I have not been this disappointed in one of my favorite teams since the Utah Jazz had the worst talent in the NBA and somehow nearly made the playoffs rather than participating in the "Lebron James sweepstakes."

Just as I was not surprised that Yahoo! would choose a random way of screwing my fantasy team, I should have expected San Francisco to blow this opportunity.  They have been the Charlie Brown of the NFL for years now.  Nothing they do is right.  I guess their tribulation goes back to when they mortgaged their future by bringing in Deion Sanders for the run at SuperBowl XXIX.  That fifth ring was probably worthwhile, but the salary cap was new back then and easy to circumvent.  Now, though, it is a major force that has become an albatross around the neck of the franchise.  Something like half of their cap is used for players who are not suiting up for the team.  For all I know, they are still wasting part of their cap space on paying the deferred salary of Sanders, and I know they are still paying for several players who are no longer in the league.

There was a time when San Francisco could do no wrong.  Bill Walsh was a draft genius as well as an offensive innovator.  During the decade of the eighties, they won four Superbowls, and during the nineties their overall record was just as good as that of the Dallas dynasty.  So, how did they fall so far?  The easy answer is Eddie Debartalo, the former owner, got caught in some illegal dealings and had to relinquish control of the franchise to his sister, Denise York.  It was his questionable morality which lead to his downfall, I think, that aided the team.  It was rumored he has mob ties, which is why I think he would have found a way to make Reggie Bush a member of his team, even if it meant connecting the 49ers offensive coordinators frequency to the headphones of whoever was head coach of the Rams last week or putting a horse head in Paul Tagliabue's bed.  It would have happened.

Instead, the mortgage came due to the 49ers for assembling the best talent in the sport for nearly twenty years.  When they first attempted to rebuild, Steve Mariucci misunderstood the flashes of brilliance by the team, and thought the process was complete.  A couple of early playoff finishes gave the management hope, and more mortgages were taken out, and development of young talent was ignored.  When the final link to the San Francisco empire, Jerry Rice, crossed the bay to particpate in the Oakland future mortgage, it was clear there were dark days ahead.  How anyone could have imagined it being this bad, I cannot say.

Two year ago, the 49ers tried to do as Bill Walsh did to build the team to begin with.  They traded down in the draft stockpiling mid-round selections.  They finally settled on Rashaun Woods with the next to last pick of the first round.  The picks they received for dropping twenty spaces amounted to little on the field, mainly because Dennis Erickson (who was a horrible choice to succeed Mariucci) refused to play the young guys, instead sending journeyman free agents who played for the league minimum out on the field.  It was not as if the team had a chance to make the playoffs.  If the young guys had gotten some experience, they might have developed into something, and still earned the team the rights to the first pick...which the crummy veterans still managed. 

Of course, the one season the 49ers played bad enough to get the marquee draft slot, there were no players who would benefit the team as a franchise player.  While the draft was deep at runningback, the 49ers had already committed to Kevan Barlow, so quarterback was where they had their hearts set.  Had Matt Leinart chosen to come out after his junior year, this would have been great.  Instead, he could not give up the college life, and the choice on possible franchise quarterback was between Utah's Alex Smith, and Cal's Aaron Rodgers.  There was no concensus choice as to which player was better.  San Francisco went with Smith, but then Rodgers (who some considered to be better than Smith) lasted until the later third of the first round.  That's a bad omen when your first overall pick might not be as good as the player a playoff team settled on.

The spiral to oblivion could have been stopped by getting a player like Reggie Bush who makes every player around him look better as his abilities must be addressed by the opposition.  At the fourth or fifth slot, the team cannot expect a player like that.  Even if a franchise guy like Vince Young or Leinart somehow drops to them, would the team even be willing to give up on Alex Smith after one season?  Maybe they get a defensive star like A.J. Hawk or build the o-line with D'Brickshaw Ferguson, but neither of those guys will inject the excitement or immediately make the team instantly better the way Bush could.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be a Boston fan.  I mean, did the diehards back in the late teens recognize the path their team was taking.  Were they able to see when Babe Ruth was shipped to the Yankees that things were unfolding in a way that would one day be called a curse?  Will I someday rue the Deion Sanders acquisition in deep retrospect as what caused my beloved team to spiral into an abyss of mediocrity?