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Setting Short Term Goals May Be Moot for Niners

Long term goals trump short term goals. Take your hypothetical long term plans to be a senior executive at your company, for example. That far-off plan trumps your short term goals of balancing the Johnson account next week and replying to your boss’s email. But if your CEO came into your office and told you to not worry about finishing up that Johnson account and to grab your golf bag because you’re the newest exec at the quarterly retreat in Pebble Beach, you’d shut down Excel faster than you can locate your putter. Suddenly, creating that formula to auto-populate Column G is no longer relevant though last week you were sweating your bonus over it.

Somehow and some way, the 49ers are in this position where their long term goals of making the playoffs may trump the short term goals we are all sweating over week to week. Because of the weak NFC West, things like the struggles of getting the play calls in to the quarterback in time, running the correct route, and holding onto the football may be given a wave of the hand at if the Niners can win ugly enough over the next five weeks and sneak into the playoffs. Doing so would meet the Niners long term goal established at the beginning of the season – making the playoffs for the first time in years.

However, like it takes a good performance of balancing enough spreadsheets to be considered for that exec role, the Niners are required to meet their short term goals like beating the dismal Arizona Cardinals this Monday night in order to possibly climb into second place in the NFC West. That’s right, even after a hopeless 21-0 loss at home against the Bucs last weekend, the 3-7 Niners could reach the second place Rams with a win and a St. Louis loss against the Broncos on Sunday.

What the Niners have the chance to be is that guy in your company who undeservedly gets promoted to the big chair though everyone else in the company knows how unqualified he really is. Sometimes execs do that, they see something through a warped looking glass and bring up a guy that everyone is pretty sure would be better suited to vacuum out an outhouse than swing dicks with the big wigs. But it happens, and the Niners or Rams, Seahawks, or Cardinals will be the 4th crappiest team in the NFC West and be invited to play among the NFL’s elite in the playoffs in January. At that point, suddenly all struggles and failures to meet the short term goals of 2010 will be forgotten and the season will be declared successful despite a year that brought the firing of an offensive coordinator, the outlandish declarations of a head coach who does not appear to know his X’s from his O’s, the benching of a first round franchise quarterback, being shutout at home for the first time since 1977, the regression of an offensive line that two first round draft picks were spent on in April, and the inability to get above .500. The last of those items remains to be seen, but the Niners are on track.

And so sometimes one is just in the right place in the right time. The other disasters in Arizona, St. Louis, and Seattle allow the 49ers to keep searching for the light at the end of a tunnel that is crumbling and collapsing on them. This Monday night on national television, they will face a team in an identical spot as they are, the also 3-7 Cardinals who, just two years removed from a stunning Super Bowl loss, have enough competency and talent to foil the 49ers long term goal and end up passing the Rams and Seahawks for NFC West representation in the first round of the playoffs. Or at least simply ensuring the Niners finish last in the NFC West. Either way, the Niners “March Madness” mentality where they win or go home continues somehow despite last week’s loss which would have hypothetically ended their season. But it didn’t, all three other NFC West teams also lost, so this unprecedented madness continues on and the Niners can still hit their end goal despite achieving almost none of their smaller goals along the way – like beating the Bucs at home.

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