The San Francisco 49ers Have Revolutionized The Concept Of Losing The Offseason

The competition for the much-coveted Who Won The Offseason Prize is nearly over. Despite a late rally from the Cleveland Browns, who became the first team to eliminate themselves from the regular season by quintupling down on the disaster that has been, is, and seems hell-bent on continuing to be Deshaun Watson, it seems clear that the winner will be the San Francisco 49ers. Besides, it's Reds Week, not Oranges Week, which means that even with that photo of Jed York in his jail smock, red is still the color of the day. And York is part of that, too, with his arrest on Monday capping what has perhaps been the single weirdest offseason in recent NFL memory. Not only did the owner of the Red And Gold (see, we told you) get arrested near a trailer park in East Palestine, Ohio and midwife the phrase "criminal tools" into the popular lexicon, but he managed to steal center stage from his head coach Kyle Shanahan, whose auto accident in Palo Alto six weeks ago still confuses folks even after he offered not one but two explanations for it. And between them, they both trumped the ongoing urban legend of the Power Plant That Eats Football Players, a theory that was developed to explain the Niners' implausibly bad injury luck; it has been debunked by those pesky scientific types but will certainly rise again the next time a 49er gets hurt. The concept of an electrical facility that emits ligament-devouring Z-rays is too delightful to reject merely because it isn't true. It is difficult to pinpoint just when the offseason became more important than the actual season in sports, though many people figure it was LeBron James' Year of The Decision, 2010. That was the summer when he left Cleveland, which is a small Ohio town 90 miles west-northwest of East Palestine, to pursue his bliss in Miami, before he found it again in Cleveland, which was before he found it in Los Angeles and directly before he found it in Philadelphia. Since then, each sport has sought to keep customers plugged in even without the benefit of games, hopping from the draft to the combine to free agency in the attempt to keep the suckers penned and feeding.

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