In Martz's 49er boot camp, Smith must step up
Published: Wednesday, August 13, 2008 at 6:19 p.m.
Last Modified: Wednesday, August 13, 2008 at 6:20 p.m.
SANTA CLARA
I interviewed 49ers offensive coordinator Mike Martz Wednesday morning. I don’t know Martz, but I know this much about him. He has to turn around the Niners’ offense fast.
He has to find a starting quarterback, and make the passing game work, and rescue the 49ers from the embarrassment they have been. I wondered if he would be talkative, open. He is not open about who will be the starting quarterback, although all signs point to J.T. O’Sullivan — more on that in a moment. It is pointless to ask Martz who the starter will be because he won’t answer and he’s tired of being asked and changes the subject.
Please read the complete transcript of my lengthy interview with him on my blog, the Cohn Zohn. For the purposes of this column. I will talk about the Niners’ quarterbacks and what Martz is looking for.
To that end, I will start with a wide receiver, rookie Robert Ortiz. He missed a ball in practice and Martz went out of his skull, screaming, pointing. “Get the (freaking) ball,” Martz shouted. “Don’t let it drop.”
It is also known that Martz can be brutal in quarterback meetings, blunt, harsh.
I bring up this harshness because so much is at stake for the Niners. They need a good quarterback or they will fail again and everyone will believe — know — the coaches and the organization don’t have a clue. So, Martz is putting the pressure on his three quarterbacks.
O’Sullivan doesn’t seem to mind. O’Sullivan has rotten manners with the media. Everything is a confrontation or a snide comment and, in that sense, he has a baseball player’s personality, not a football player’s. From what I understand. he isn’t a sweetie pie with the other quarterbacks, either. This is competition and he wants to win.
This makes him a Martz kind of player. Spit in everyone’s eye. Be tough. Don’t give a damn. Play your heart out. This personality is especially important in a quarterback. When O’Sullivan misses a pass in practice, he gets mad. When Alex Smith misses a pass — I swear he’s missing more and more — he drops his head, looks defeated, crawls into himself.
For goodness sake, get mad, Alex. Don’t show defeat. Lift up your head. Be like O’Sullivan.
Smith is a better quarterback than O’Sullivan but he is losing this quarterback competition on character, nerve, guts or whatever you want to call it. And that’s a shame. If O’Sullivan wins, the Niners will have a limited quarterback who does a few things well. But they will have a quarterback with guts. You would prefer a quarterback with guts and limited talent to a quarterback with talent and limited guts.
Think about that, Alex.
Now, I’m going to do something I almost never do. I’m going to reproduce dialogue between Martz and me, lots of it. You will hear him explain his tough-guy philosophy. Then draw your own conclusions.
“You have got to put pressure on these guys (the players in camp) as much as you can,” he said, “and make them deal with it. We don’t have time, we only have three weeks. So if this guy has talent — and they all have talent — what you don’t know is if they’ve got enough heart, strength in their character (he made a fist) to deal with the stress of playing this game at a high level.
“Otherwise you have a guy who did really well in practice and you get in a game and he kind of disappears on you. I put as much pressure on them as I can and some of them you see them and they’re resilient to it and you don’t have to mess with them.
“(Rookie wide receiver) Josh Morgan’s an example. I never mess with Josh. But some of these kids they come in here, the learning curve is very short here. We don’t have a lot of time and they don’t understand it. To get that full knowledge of what they can do — quarterbacks, too — you’ve got to produce fire and then when camp is over I become the teacher I was raised to be. That’s something I learned by necessity. You’ve got to find ways to put the pressure on them. It’s not real comfortable for me to do, but that’s what you have to do.”
Q: I think part of what’s going on with quarterbacks is putting them under duress. I wish Alex Smith would tell someone to go (screw) himself, tell you to go (screw) yourself. It would be good for him.
A: “I’m not sure that reaction is the right reaction. That part is not, but the toughness part, the assertiveness in the situation is what I’m looking for, what I’m always looking for. I’m not specifically talking about Alex. I’m talking about all the players. To get angry – emotion’s not what I’m looking for. It’s attitude. Emotion, go (screw) yourself, that’s not important. I want them to be resilient. If they fail at something, they’re resilient enough to bounce back and go out and do it again.
“Sometimes, it’s a tough road. They have to fight their way through it. It’s not an easy lesson when things have been going good your whole career — all these guys have been very successful — and the NFL is an elite league of the world. If you want to be the elite of the elite, then there’s a certain mental toughness and attitude, if you will, that’s required. Without that, you can never achieve that level of excellence that you aspire to. It’s not that emotion I’m looking for, it’s the toughness.
“Joe Montana’s a good example. Joe was a tough guy, assertive. He was very competitive. He wasn’t intimidated by anything. He probably thought there wasn’t anything he couldn’t deal with. And that’s what you’re looking for. A lot of things can bombard a guy and make him second-guess himself. What we’re trying to do is make them think, ‘I can do this, get out of my way.’”
I want to repeat: Martz was not speaking about Smith. He was speaking in general about the boot-camp nature of training camp. But, come on, this is the ultimate test for Smith against O’Sullivan, an inferior practitioner of the quarterback craft.
Smith is being tested. He needs to pass the test. He can’t second-guess himself. (I think he does.) He needs to believe, really believe, “I can do this. Get out of my way, JTO.”
Smith's hesitance comes from the philosophy of Nolan, being that he is trying to mold the 49ers into Baltimore West. That means all he wants from Smith is to not make take chances, and manage the game with a conservative approach. Really, you could have drafted a QB in the lower rounds if you wanted that. Nolan wanted to bring in Dilfer in his first year. Heck, Nolan said that he thought Dilfer played the best at the position he had ever seen, after a loss last season, after he threw Smith under the bus. Talk about salt being poured into Smith's wounds. But now, all of the sudden, Martz is here. How do you go from a game manager to an assassin in one training camp? Especially if you have weak fundamentals already? Turner scaled down his offense to emphasize Smith's natural abilities, which was his mobility, but it was no where near a dynamic offense, outside of the running game, and if Gore wasn't there, and you had to put the offense on Smith's back, well, we can only guess how that would work out. There is no way in hell Smith would win a QB shootout. The only time the 49ers scored more than 2 tds was against OAK in 2006. God Bless DET fan. I'll never exprerence their full pain, but the Yorks will probably retain Nolan, like the Fords retain Millen, and even worse, Nolan might post an 8-8 season, and we will also have our own Wayne Fontes too.
Also, remember that Smith's best friend committed suicide a week ago and the funeral was Friday in Smith's family's back yard - so Alex Smith had a whole lot other than football on his mind for this preseason game. 
BTW--I agree with Drummer
