Greg Roman, who has always been a target of 49ers fans who think their team should score 40 a game, decided to fall on a sword that rightly ought to be a kebab skewer . . . as in, he shouldn’t be the only ingredient.
“When we fall short, I mean, it starts squarely with me,” Roman said Thursday. “I’ve got to do a better job, getting us prepared, getting us to execute better, so it really starts with me. And I think we’re constantly evaluating and critiquing. Second guessing gets you nowhere. That’s pretty much worthless. But as far as critiquing and evaluating, constantly.”
But since he didn’t say specifically what he was doing so wrong, we can dismiss his apologia as standard/insincere taking one for the team without actually taking one for the team. I mean, he could have said, “Hey, go check with the Khaki Avenger. He gets to say no.”
I mean, it’s not like his boss’ bosses aren’t thinking that.
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Meanwhile, in Bloomington, Indiana, the Other Harbaugh, Tom Crean, is fighting a real fire, and it’s with his own team.
Two days after announcing three players had been suspended for four games each, Crean, the Indiana basketball coach and a Harbaugh by marriage, spent 45 minutes taking questions about the state of the program, which isn’t cheerful at all. Sophomore forward Devin Davis remains hospitalized after sustaining a serious head injury Saturday morning when freshman forward Emmitt Holt allegedly ran into him with a car, and yes, alcohol was involved.
So Crean has decided to go bad-cop-bad-cop.
“We're not doing a great job in leadership at all,” he said in reviewing this latest incident. “If I could go back and do it over, we'd have practiced till 11:30 p.m., midnight, showered up, got 'em something to eat, took 'em back to my house, figured out how we were going to do it, got up the next morning, came back in here [Assembly Hall] shortly after 5, when it's legal to practice again.
“Sterner sometimes means we've got to take more away. We've got to bring more to this that gets their attention. Sterner is how do we get their attention and how do we get it again, again and again?” he said. “OK, we've had a lot of people come through in 16 years as a head coach that have dealt with sterner and ended up pretty good. But I just think you have to continue to get their attention any way possible.”
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And now, a hot take about marking your territory, in the Alex Rodriguez mess, and we do mean mess with his drug beard and titular relative Yuri Sucart, whom he allegedly paid $1 million to keep quiet.
Anyway, Sucart’s wife Carmen weighed in for the New York Daily News, and it was unpleasant . . . and hilarious.
”Alex is an a------.” Ashe told the paper. “He is a bad person.” She said Rodriguez came to the Miami home Rodriguez provided to the Sucarts in 2010 and vowed to destroy the family if they went public with his use of performance-enhancing drugs. Then he urinated on the floor, she said, as if to mark the house as his territory. “He was so arrogant, he came into my house like he thought he was a god.”
I think she meant the popular palindrome for God. You know, “dog.”
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And finally (hey, it’s Friday, and I have Bible study), Steve Kerr says he’s nobody babyface after receiving his first official Joey Wednesday night.
“I have a temper,” Kerr told reporters including the lovely and curvaceous Comrade Poole. “And I probably shouldn't say anything more because I already got myself in a little bit of trouble in my interview with (ESPN) in the third quarter (when he was asked about his first T from The Lord High Crawford). “I just want to protect our guys if I don't feel good about what's going on on the floor. So if I have to get some technicals, I will. I've got a little bit of a temper at times and it flared up.”
Kerr said he has not been fined, but he did receive a morning phone call from the NBA office. Probably congratulations for surviving his first Joey.
