(By Joe Kukura) Life becomes worth living again, as NFL teams have opened their training camps league-wide. We contemplated the nascent Oakland Raiders Tuesday, and the consider the similarly-underdog 49ers today. The two teams will play to open their preseason Friday at 7 p.m. at McAfee Coliseum. Leadership voids -- who's gonna fill 'em? Leadership voids are the only thing these 49ers know for sure they have. Sure, Patrick Willis has a fucking "S"......

By Joe Kukura Football, people! Unless you live under the worst toupee in sports broadcasting, you know that the NFL Draft was this weekend. Endless hours of live intrigue and analysis, both Saturday and Sunday, nonstop on two different cable channels – with no actual sports of any sort being played at all. Just your NFL team’s future stars or GHB scofflaws being selected and introduced in front of the unpredictable rowdies assembled at......

With the perpetual rebuilding process that is the San Francisco 49er franchise, every so often an old part of old successes will cycle back through SF. This Sunday, Gilroy’s second-most-favorite export returns to the Bay Area at the reigns of Chucky Gruden’s particular strain of West Coast Offense. You never should have been run out of town, Jeff....

Egads. A man fell to his death yesterday at Monster Park after falling 20 feet from the upper concourse area of the stadium to the concrete mezzanine below. Scary. And sad. According to the Chronicle, the 31-year-old sports fan "went to the concession area between sections 5 and 7 to hang out during halftime about 2:20 p.m. and fell over a wall to the floor below." After two other accidents that happened in the......

Here's todays sports news...

Here's todays sports news...

Here's a roundup of today's sporting news...

-With tonight's 108-82 win against the running joke that is the New York Knicks (seriously, what does it take to get fired in that organization?), the Warriors have now won three in a row and are one game from totaling the amount of wins our local football teams have. The Beard led the way with 31 points, seven assists and six rebounds and Stephen Jackson got 23 points. For the Knicks, Starbury played his first game of the season showing that blackmail does work ...

We'd like to thank the Golden State Warriors for winning twice this weekend and thus ending the month and a half long losing streak by the local teams. And now, onto the carnage... ...

This weekend's Muni news spans both ends of the Kinsey scale: for straight people, football; for the gays, Cirque du Soleil. Of course, gays are also allowed to like sports. (All those bulging uniforms! And the cheerleaders! Mmmmm.) And if the Republican party has taught us anything, it's that straight married men secretly adore, and aspire to be, limber fags in spandex. The Cirque will be performing in the parking lot of AT&T park, which......

If there's anybody in the city taking more heat than Mike Nolan, it's his quarterback, Alex Smith. Smith stands accused by the Faithful of not very being good. The evidence? Overthrowing Receivers. Underthrowing Receivers. Not seeing open Receivers. The numbers back up the evidence-- he has a preposterously low QB rating (57.2) and completion percentage (48.7). He is also 11-19 as a starting QB. In the games we've watched, Smith looked like the same QB he was when he first started-- skittish and inaccurate-- so much so, the Faithful are muttering that Smith, as a #1 draft pick, has been a bust of Lucy Pinder-like proportions (sort of NSFW-y). ...

With the Niners sinking like John McCain's Presidential campaign, the inevitable finger pointing has begun. After all, the team has not gotten better, but actually regressed from last year and you could argue that the team has regressed even farther to 2004-2005 levels of suckitude. So the question being asked is who the heck is to blame. The inevitable target? Mike Nolan. ...

Here's todays sports news...

Thank goodness. Let the blessed distraction begin. For just a little while, there there be kickoffs and touchdowns and the illusion of a level playing field. Tonight, it's time for the National Football League's 2007 regular season to begin. Wonderful....

Yesterday, the gentleman who came to be called The Genius passed away from leukemia at the age of 75....

Madden's in the Hall Of Fame. The Raiders have committed their first false start penalties. The NFL's 2006 Preseason is underway. Let's move with all due speed to present the members of your San Francisco 49ers' 2006 Draft class....