....and promote Alex Smith to #1 QB instead of Tim Rattay.
I guess I'm not surprised that this has happened. The thinking presumably is that the 49'ers didn't invest all of that money in Smith to have him holding a clipboard. However, the Bengals kept Carson Palmer on the bench for his first season, and that seems to have worked out rather well. Sink or swim never worked well as a coaching technique for swimmers, and I still don't believe it necessarily works well in the NFL. You walk a fine line between giving a young QB hard experience and destroying his confidence.
I have three words of advice for Alex Smith: Learn To Run.
The 49'ers offense is porous right now. Tim Rattay had trouble moving the team on Sunday night, partly because he spent a significant amount of playing time outside what was left of the pocket trying to avoid being knocked down, and his (relative) lack of mobility is not an asset in a situation like that.
Alex Smith had better bone up on sprints and direction changes, because if that offensive line doesn't begin to block better, he will be running for his life later in the season. Perhaps as early as Sunday. Perhaps he should consider calling David Carr for some advice...
Meanwhile, the 49'ers are stuck in damage limitation mode after benching Jamie Winborn and asking him to go sit at home. Their actions have essentially eliminated what little trade value he had (and with a base salary of $1.75 million and a contract expiring at the end of this season, his attraction as a trade target was debatable to begin with).
After October 18th, if no trade materializes, the 49'ers will be caught between a rock and a hard place, with limited options: cut Winborn and take a significant cap hit, bring him back into the team (which will, whichever way they explain it, look like an admission that they were wrong in the first place) or de-activate him to avoid confronting the issue entirely. Not a happy situation.
The 49'ers made a bad decision to bench Winborn in this way. Not playing means that Winborn cannot show teams what he can do - he has no shop window, and if the 49'ers are serious about a trade, they need him to be out there showing that he is worth giving up draft picks for.