Brandon Jacobs, we hardly knew ye.
Well, we knew ye, but we didn’t hear or see ye very often. What we did, really, was read ye. And worse yet, so did Jim Harbaugh.
Jacobs’ suspension, good for the final three games of the year and almost certainly without pay, really is a small sidebar. He was the backup fullback on a team that barely used one. He was the fifth running back on a team that needs only four. He carried the ball five times, plus a sixth that was nullified by a penalty.
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He was, in short, only slightly more of a 49er than your uncle Sneed. And after picking at the scab called Harbaugh one final time, he got what was inevitable. The last three weeks off, without pay.
Although, frankly, even if he got paid, it would have been worth it to the 49ers to pay to see the back of him.
This is not a tragedy, either, because Jacobs wanted this. He’d been agitating for it with his constant Twitterosity, which started as a plea to play and ended as a jailhouse rant. He was so persistent about it that Harbaugh surely felt cornered, almost as though the team was waiting for him to do something about Jacobs.
So with a few terse “no comments,” Harbaugh dropped the final pretense Monday afternoon. He had already decided long ago that Jacobs wasn’t worth the activation, so deciding that he wasn’t worth the roster spot was not a difficult choice. The only question that lingers is why this didn’t happen earlier.
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And the answer to that may lie in the loss of Kendall Hunter. Jacobs thought he had finally found his way into regular duty, even though he is essentially a fullback on a team that doesn’t use one. When LaMichael James, who is militantly not a fullback, got not only the roster spot but the number of touches he got, Jacobs knew that escape, even if it was really exile, was his future in San Francisco.
And now it is. He will be known mostly as Braylon Edwards 2.0, if he is remembered at all. Then again, as we said, we hardly knew ye.
Except when he was on Ye Olde Twitterre.