The easy thing to do is to pile on Niner wideout Kyle Williams. Call him an all time goat and keep moving. And I’m trying not to do that. The guy was in tough spot: sure, he butchered two punts, the second of which set up the Giants winning field goal in O.T. and yes, he was filling in for Ted Ginn and didn’t have a ton of experience returning punts. Then again, he didn’t have to know the first rule of punt returns: catch it, or get the hell out of the way. And he did neither in the third quarter when a punt went right off his stick and was recovered by the Giants. And then the second he was stripped in O.T., you know the Giants were minutes away from winning and Williams was seconds away from trending on Twitter. And sure enough he was: right along side Wedding Crashers, Chaz Bono and #30thingsi’mgood at. Next thing you know, Williams is getting Twitter death threats from disgruntled Niner fans.
Look, social networking has been an unbelievable boon to us all in so many ways. But in others, it’s one of the worst things ever: for instance it empowers cowards to abuse and threaten peoples’ lives they’ve never even met. If you find yourself threatening athletes’ lives on Twitter, you need to rethink yours. And while Kyle Williams may have been the goat, he’s far from the only reason you lost that game Niner fan. His two mistakes were terrible, but the Niner offense overall was nearly as bad. That unit was supposed to thrive on that wet track: instead, it just spun its tires and dug itself deeper and deeper into the mud. Stop threatening Kyle Williams life, look up at the scoreboard and own it. The better team won.
