Niners, Nolan absorb a difficult defeat

SEATTLE – Mike Nolan was on the sideline Monday night, where you expected him to be. The family profession demanded it. When you are the kid of an NFL football coach – who once coached the same team, no less – there is no decision to be made.

And so it was that Mike Nolan, the day after his father died, put the headphones over his ears and a cloak over his heart as his team went out and stunk up the joint against the Seahawks. Dick Nolan, when he coached the 49ers from 1968-75, surely had some nights this bad. But were any as sad as this 24-0 defeat?

For so many different reasons?

If this had been a television movie, the 49ers would have somehow found a way to channel the competitiveness of both Nolan coaches and pulled off an upset of the Seahawks.

This wasn’t a TV movie. It was the same old 49ers reality show of 2007, the one where the offense operates in an invisible sludge and goes nowhere, while the defense holds on as long as it can before suffering a breakdown.

They’ve now lost seven in a row.

Last week, just by coincidence before the news about his dad became so grim, I asked Mike Nolan if being the son of a coach had prepared him for the travails of a season like this one.

“It’s different when you’re the child of the coach going through it,” Nolan admitted, “because you see it through his eyes. If it’s helped me any place, it’s probably with my own children, in trying to educate them about what to face. I know that every day my son has to go school and … like this morning, that’s one of the things I told him: “It’s going to be a tough day for you, too. Do the right thing and handle it well.’ “

After that particular conversation, Nolan said, his son had told him he loved him. Nolan admitted that had moved him – and as it turned out, just a few days later, he ended up flying to Texas where he surely told his own father the same thing just before Alzheimer’s disease complicated by prostrate cancer ended his battle.