49ers’ Jennings having fun

Associated Press

SANTA CLARA, Calif.

Brian Jennings turned to social media to share the story of how he shaved off his right eyebrow during the bye week before taking a razor to the other side for the sake of staying balanced.

A long snapper in the limelight, you don’t see that every day.

“Long snapper is one of those positions that if your name ever gets said it’s a bad thing,” quarterback Alex Smith said Wednesday. “You’re just expected to do your job out there and that’s it, and he does that. He takes so much pride in doing his job and how he goes about it. A model of consistency.”

Jennings is an outspoken NFL specialist with some serious longevity — and he is having a ball being part of a winner again this season for San Francisco (10-2). The 49ers clinched the NFC West with last Sunday’s 26-0 win against St. Louis.

“Everything,” Jennings said of how much it means to get back to the playoffs. “That’s what makes losing so hard. When you have losing seasons, they’re dog years — you know, 7-1. It just ages you back. It’s miserable. It’s hard. Fortunately we’ve been able to get back on the winning track.”

Jennings is the only one in the locker room who can remember when things were last rolling like this, because he is the lone player still around from the franchise’s last playoff run in 2002.

“In some ways it seems like a lifetime ago, absolutely,” Jennings said. “We had a lot of veteran guys. We had a lot of fun. We worked hard in practice. We goofed off a lot but then on game day we were serious and won football games. A lot of laughing. A very confident group.”

An unassuming veteran who has made his living under the radar for more than a decade with the 49ers, Jennings has survived through five head coaches and years of failure and frustration.

He survived that silly shaving mishap a couple of months back, too.

“I had the clippers and some straggly eyebrows and went voom, just shaved it off,” Jennings explained. “I had to quickly figure out what I was going to do, so I shaved off the other one to make them symmetrical, the outside two-thirds. It worked out. I decided to put a picture of it on Twitter as a character test in not taking myself too seriously.”