NFL Dos and Don'ts: San Francisco 49ers

As we prepare for another year of NFL football, let's take a look back at the highs and lows from 2014 for each team. Welcome to NFL Dos and Don'ts. If you missed one, you can read all our recaps right here.

Boy, oh boy did the 49ers have themselves an offseason. Huge losses across the roster and coaching staff make this a bizarre time for a team that was an NFL darling not two years ago. Now?

Harbaugh: Gone.

Justin Smith: Retired.

Chris Borland: Retired.

Anthony Davis: Retired.

Patrick Willis: Re-ti-red.

Frank Gore: On the Colts.

Aldon Smith: Sweet Jesus, what a fucking mess.

All of this and maybe everyone jumped the gun Colin Kaepernick's game, too. Oh yeah, they still play in the same division as the team who's gone to two straight Super Bowls, so…you know.

Do

Still, enough doom and gloom, right? Let's get to the good stuff.

Frank Gore (sorry!) absolutely leveled a pair of San Diego Chargers on his way to out-pacing and out-muscling some more Chargers for a 52-yard touchdown run in Week 16. This is the kind of shit that gets fans jacked up for football. Hard, crunching hits that register no visible signs of injury. It is pure adrenaline and even the most casual of fans utters a hoo, damn. Sure, the toll of these and lesser hits over the course of a career almost certainly will have a debilitating effect, but we have compartmentalized those facts in order to enjoy the game. This works for us, the fans, but not many others involved and it's a problem that the NFL is having the damnedest time reckoning: what makes it so thrilling and popular also makes it untenable.

Anywho, sorry to get all bummed out with your Do, San Francisco, but that's kind of the way it's gone for you guys of late. As a show of good faith, here is recent 49ers free agent pickup Torrey Smith's son dancing better than Riley Curry could ever hope to.

Don't

Jim Harbaugh is almost certainly as crazy person. Either that, or he's the most committed person to ever put on a public persona, which would also make him kind of deranged. So, sure, it makes sense that things didn't work out with his employer and that his GM Trent Baalke felt at his wits' end.

But now we're all deprived of the lunacy of Jim Harbaugh unless we want to go watch college football and college football is the goddamned worst, so who's doing that? Also, his first three years with the team went as follows: NFC Championship Game appearance, Super Bowl appearance, NFC Championship Game appearance. Pretty good!

I dunno, If I'm a GM, I try to make it work with that guy and I just deal with the other weird shit as best I can. What other weird shit? Like his trip to Washington, where he regaled the Wall Street Journal about his time with Chief Justice John Roberts. "'He showed me the Declaration of Independence written in stone,' he said. 'Very memorable.'" Imagine saying to a person something like "My experience was memorable." Jim Harbaugh is a Speak & Spell in khaki paints.

You Don't get rid of this kind of crazy, 49ers. You hang on to it for dear life.