First-round draft pick Joe Staley continues to share his experiences as a 49ers rookie in his very own online diary. Staley talks about the trip to Atlanta, a shark watching excursion, and the Monday night game. Check out what the 49ers starting right tackle had to say...
My cousin Scott Bane came to the Falcons game. I'll give him a shout out because he reads my blog every time I update it. He's a strapping 30-something year old teacher from Daytona Beach, Florida who has the quintessential GQ looks. I can say that, he's my blood and looks a lot like me, obviously.
I've taken a lot of trips down to Florida to his house, two spring break trips while I was in college along with about seven other guys from my team, so I felt like I had to take care of him when he came up to Atlanta. I treated him to a great dinner at the Cheesecake Factory, which I love because the portions are ginormous and they've got a lot of delectables tatonies, which is an inside joke in our family for what we call appetizers.
My hair is back to normal, although again, I'd argue against anybody who said it looked bad before despite the screwed up haircut. I also got to wear my grey suit, the one I talked about in my last diary. I got many, many compliments on it. I even got a compliment from the head coach who said I looked very sharp. Even Coach Warhop gave me some praise, which doesn't usually happen.
So the Falcons game, we lost, again. It sucks losing, and I say that every time I know, but it's true. We had a different energy and attitude it seemed like going into that game, but any way you slice it, we lost it, which sucks – regardless of how you think you played.
It was good seeing Harvey Dahl. He was upset because he was inactive before that game and he had to do a bunch of running before the game started.
I graded out the best I had done in the year with only two minuses out of 66 plays, but when you lose, you just don't even feel good about that. One of my mistakes was I had a short set one time on John Abraham and he beat me inside so I just tripped him. Thankfully he didn't get to Alex because of the trip, but that was a bad play. The other minus was we were in this power play and I took bad footwork and allowed their three technique to get some penetration.
Justin Smiley got hurt in the game, but Dave Baas went in and played very well. That's the good thing about having depth on the offensive line, someone goes down, another guy steps up.
A bunch of guys on Tuesday went great white shark hunting out by the Farallon Islands, located about two and half hours off the coast. We were not fishing for them mind you, hunting, meaning searching them out.
We saw two sharks, but we waited like six hours to see two and it was just getting to the point where we were all crabby. It wasn't anything like we thought it was going to be. We thought we'd be throwing bait in the water and having them surround us, but all you really did was tie yourself off at a buoy and wait and watch. We did see a shark breach. The guy who took us said he'd only seen that one other time before, so that was kind of unique.
Overall, I think Tony Wragge took a lot of heat because he was the one who organized the trip and everyone got mad because we thought it was a half day thing, but we ended up being out on the water for 12 hours, after getting up at 4AM to leave in the first place. Thankfully no one got sea sick as the pills we took for that worked. Brandon Moore even had a motion sick patch behind his ear.
I saw American Gangster this week. I liked it a lot. At first I was kind of wary of it, thinking it was another one of those drug movies and the same old kind of role for Denzel Washington, but it turned out much different and it finished up very well. I left satisfied at the end of movie.
I'm very, very excited about Sean Estrada being back. We were supposed to get dinner on Tuesday but again the shark extravaganza took up the whole day. It is good to have another kid to hang with who is not married, and /or whipped by a girl which seems to be every other offensive lineman on the team besides me.
Another reason I'm happy to have him back is because he can help foot the food bill.
I know he's only on practice squad so it probably won't be a 50-50 split, but just having him help with the fetching and some of the bill will be great. I've talked to all of my other buddies in the NFL and they all have at least one rookie to help them, where I've been all by my lonesome at my position. Everything has gone smooth however in terms of the Friday pre-travel orders. Since my earlier beef with Popeye's, they've really stepped up to the plate and have done a fabulous job.
It's going to be a grudge match this Monday. We definitely played bad as an offensive line in the first game against them. That's no secret. We've got a bad taste from that game, and we want to come out swinging and take care of what we need to take care of. We've really got to get a win. The fact that it'll be on Monday Night Football – it's a great chance to show the nation that we are a talented team that can perform well. We are not a team that is going to quit, and if we win the game, we are just one game back so I think that would be some solid momentum for us.
