This may ultimately mean nothing for Pat White as it relates to his future or his sudden end as a member of the Miami Dolphins, but he wasn’t terrible in Friday night’s preseason game. In fact, save one sack, he was about as perfect as an onlooker could expect. Most meaningful, it seemed, was that he actually played.

What about Sparano’s apparent edict way back on Monday that he wouldn’t play this week? Maybe that meant White had a good week of practice?

“Who knows,” he said wearily.

Did he know he was going to play before Friday’s game?

“Really didn’t have a clue,” he said. “It really doesn’t matter. When called upon, you just have to go in there and help your team as much as possible.”

And White, who figures to play some more on Thursday at Dallas, fell short of his personal standard of contribution.

“We needed points on the board,” he said. “We didn’t get the points we needed. It doesn’t feel good to lose, period. No matter what happened on the field, it’s a loss.”

Jarrett Brown’s 2010 future is clear. He won’t be a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers. There’s no mystery there — the coach toldhim as much. Yet that same coach liked Brown enough to give him a chance to be something other than an afterthought.

An odd sight from Saturday: Jarrett Brown, the 49ers’ fourth-string quarterback, went racing down field on a special-teams coverage unit. It turns out Singletary approached the rookie free agent out of West Virginia and told him that he wouldn’t be playing quarterback in 2010. The coach offered Brown a chance to show off his other skills.

 “I just asked him, ‘What other things can you do? What value to you have?’ Give me some ideas about other things that you’ve done,’ ” Singletary said. “He said, ‘I want to do whatever I can to be part of this team.’ ”