bp

As luck would have it, over the last couple of weeks I've found myself dealing with life situations so demanding that I have had very little time to pay attention to any sports coverage, including the Super Bowl. I did manage to see most of that, in trying circumstances, but since then, like you, I've avoided the usual sports channels I visit, and for the same reasons as you. As I say, I haven't had much time to think about things outside a few currently urgent situations, but every time I do I also become more and more aware of the magnitude of the suckage involved in losing this last game.

I'll only add one comment about the officiating. We've heard a lot about this group of referees being chosen because they didn't call a lot of penalties, and how they were trying to let the players play and all that. OK, fair enough...BUT, if those same referees hadn't called that formation penalty against the 49ers on the very first play of the game, I believe the outcome would have been totally different. So yeah, I believe the 49ers were playing on an AWAY field last Sunday. That doesn't mean that Jim Harbaugh and his gang of men performed any near their best, however, and they just should have, that's all.

Kevin,

The point about the team needing more force at the position going forward than Gore can apparently now provide is unchallengeable, I think. But it's still bittersweetly weird to consider that if the right play had been called for him during that crucial first-and-goal near the end of the game, he might well be walking around today as the Super Bowl MVP.

Asa,

You're fully within your rights to laugh at me for saying this, but I fully believe A) Smith would not have allowed the team to fall behind 17 or 22 points in the first place, and B) that he would indeed have come back from those deficits, probably faster than Kaepernick did. People conveniently forget that Smith led a number of impressive come-from-behind victories for this team.

I'm not arguing that Kaepernick isn't the team's QB of the future, but I still believe fervently that Smith was and should have been the QB of the present.