Week 6: I Am Conflicted

A picture is worth a thousand words. Or, in this case, 16 football seasons.

So this week, the San Francisco 49ers continue the 2010 Crushing Disappointment Tour by playing host to their cousins and cross-bay rivals, the Oakland Raiders. The 49ers are 0-5 and currently running away with the "biggest disappointment of 2010" award, their head coach quickly turning from "beloved charismatic leader and difference maker" to "overmatched motivational speaker who can yell at people but can't actually coach and needs to be fired now!" (such is the nature of sports fans; a winning streak means the team is inevitably super bowl bound; a losing streak means everyone involved is an incompetent and embarrassing failure who needs to be fired then tarred and feathered while they're cleaning out their desk); their starting quarterback a former #1 overall pick and heir to the franchise's unsurpassed Quarterbacking Legacy turned public whipping boy and effigy for organization-wide shortcomings and fan frustration (to the point where he was booed after every single play and the fans openly chanted for his backup to be put in the game, but this is an essay I'm saving for a later week), and an owner who has inherited the team from his business-savvy but football-foolish parents and gone from "spitting image of his uncle, the great Eddie DeBartolo who's gonna turn the team around just like Eddie did!" to the guy who is angrily tweeting at reporters that his 0-5 team is still guaranteed to win the division this year. No, really, he actually did that.

It takes a massive effort to out-dysfunction the modern-day Oakland Raiders, but that's the one competition the 49ers have managed to win this year.

The Raiders, for their part, come in at a 2-3 that truly could and should be 3-2 if kicking field goals truly were as easy a task as most NFL kickers make it appear to be and all NFL pre-game show "expert" pundits smugly assume it to be. No small feat for a team that has spent the last seven seasons being a woeful punchline for those same smug pundits, especially considering they've managed this without a single professional-quality offensive lineman, as ACLB's official Raider correspondent Harpo has routinely pointed out. They even broke their 13 game losing streak against divisional foe the San Diego Chargers last week. There's signs of life in The Oakland Coliseum these days; though of course they've spent so long discouraging even their fearsome fan base that every one of their 3 home games this season has been blacked out; The Relevance Revolution Will, Apparently, Not Be Televised.

So anyway, this week the battle of the bay is on us, as a rare 2-team NFL market squabbles amongst itself as it does once every four years in a game that matters. The 49ers and Raiders, for as much they accentuate their differences from each other in their marketing and as much as their respective fan bases insult and stereotype each other as being from different walks of life -- as if NFL teams truly did still represent communities and cultures and ideologies and weren't just the bunch of millionaire mercenaries toiling for billionaire corporate overlords we deep down know them all to be, because they've priced us out of even attending their home games live and attempt to charge us shakedown fees to tailgate on "their" property even though those stadiums were built with OUR tax dollars...but that is definitely an essay for another time -- but anyway for all their aesthetic and superficial differences, the 49ers and Raiders are almost a perfect mirror image of each other. Both teams have glorious pasts, filled with Super Bowl victories, Hall Of Fame Players, iconic uniforms, and international fan bases that spawned long before the league decided it needed to "cultivate new markets" overseas with a token regular season game in London.

More recently, of course, the franchises have mirrored each other in misery. Both last played a playoff game in 2002 (oddly enough, both teams' last playoff game involved getting their ass kicked by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Like I said, mirror images). Both teams have since embarked on the worst stretches of epic futility either franchise has ever experienced (the Raiders have established a new NFL record for consecutive seasons of 11+ losses; the 49ers started this season with a record of 33-67 in their last 100 games, a precise .333 winning percentage; that's 2 out of every 3 games for six years.) Both organizations venerate their glory days and insist their return is literally Just Around The Corner because, as it turns out, it's a lot easier to do that than to hire football-smart General Managers to run your team effectively in the modern NFL and build a glorious, or even respectable, present. To further illustrate that point, both teams were retarded enough in recent years to send Jeff Garcia packing when he was at least twice as good as any of the QB's they kept instead of him.

And, as you readers can probably infer from the title of this entry if not the content, the teams are finally similar in the fact that I'm a big fan of both. While the 49ers will always be first in my sports-fan heart, having earned my loyalty during my childhood when they were the NFL's version of the old British Empire; spanning the globe, colonizing (and plundering) and dominating teams across the league like so many underdeveloped African or Southeast Asian Nations, adding Super Bowls to the trophy case left and right as though they were more rubies and emeralds in the Imperial Crown, and basically being that one really obnoxious team that fans across the rest of the nation either jumped on the bandwagon in an attempt at front-running or utterly reviled for either squeaking by or crushing their favorite team in the playoffs again and again and again year after year after year. Meanwhile the Raiders were growing out their beard to turn heel and represent Los Angeles for 13 seasons, but upon their return to the Bay Area I converted my basement into a bedroom and made room for them, too. I'd heard and read about their lore as a kid, too, and thought it would be cool to have them back and have TWO good football teams to watch regularly, even though it quickly turned out that just because the Raiders were back in Oakland, they weren't really the Oakland Raiders anymore (and haven't been since, but I'm treading on Harpo's territory now).

This is my brain. This is my brain on Football, only both the angry yelling
and laughter at the absurd are both uselessly aimed outward at an indifferent world.
Any Questions?

Fast Forward to today: instead of getting two GOOD teams to watch regularly, I am stuck watching two shitty teams bumble their way through a macabre dance in which they attempt to out-embarrass each other; one on my TV and the other on sketchy internet streams on my computer because they're blacked out (again), putting gray hairs on my head and foul words on my tongue. For me, Sundays invariably consist of watching Six Non-Stop Hours of Shitty Football. Since 2003 I have, in effect, watched 14 consecutive seasons of constant losing, busted draft picks, incompetent management, poor coaching, and worst of all opposing fan bases pathetically trash talking each other (when fans of a 6-10 team talk shit at fans of a 4-12 team, it comes off much like when the two Special Ed kids in school challenge each other to a fight on the playground at recess), with all signs pointing toward upping that total to 16 by this December. This would be bad enough, but it is made all the worse not only by how good these teams used to be, but the fact that this was SUPPOSED to be the year the 49ers finally dragged themselves out of that quicksand of sucktitude and were a respectable, nay, even good team again, because their pre-school division was Theirs By Default. Not the same as Theirs By Birthright like it was in the 80s and 90s, but damn it, close enough.

So, with my dual loyalties, naturally I hoped that by the time this game rolled around at least one team would be in such a favorable position they could afford to lose this game, thus I could pick a side safely knowing that both teams could come out ahead. Instead, the opposite is true; both teams badly need this win and thus, no matter what, at least one of them comes out of this game with Zero Hope. It's like Sophie's Choice, only with football. Oh, and except that even the "winner" of this game is effectively doomed anyway and is just delaying the inevitable for a couple weeks by claiming Local Bragging Rights, especially the 49ers. So the choice is utterly irrelevant and no one will be saved anyway. So, not really like Sophie's Choice at all, then. Nevermind. They're 0-5 and, despite what Jed York and Mike Singletary would love to tell you, they are not winning the division this season. All they can really do by winning this game is bury the Raiders at 2-4 right now, instead of allowing the Raiders the privilege of burying themselves in a couple weeks. If the 49ers lose, The Raiders will get to pretend for a while longer at 3-3, while the Niners themselves will be, at 0-6, in a hole so deep and awful and without hope and light that we fans can only laugh at it, them, and ourselves, to continue the process of self-abuse; wanting the team to finish as poorly as possible so as to get that #1 draft pick, booing the starting quarterback off the field and demanding his backup start playing even though every single one of us knows that David Carr cannot possibly be any better and is in all probability an inferior athlete who is even more lacking in confidence than Alex Smith and will thus fuck things up even worse, mock the head coach we thought was the bee's knees last season, and demand management blow the team up even though there's a lot of good parts who don't deserve to be blown up and it would be foolish to throw away plus we hate management and ownership and don't trust them to rebuild the team properly anyway since after all their lack of skill or even enthusiasm in that department is what led to this team being so shitty in the first place.

Sadly, even if the 49ers finally grab a win this week, I won't really be able to enjoy it. While I'm not much of one for predictions (that's an entry for another correspondent, as Neil's predictions posts in re: his beloved Lions are far more thorough and entertaining and sometimes even semi-accurate than I could ever manage), I will say I think the 49ers will win this game, but I feel I must preface that by saying my two reasons for for anticipating a 49er victory are:

1) When this game rolls around every few seasons, the 49ers invariably win out in my heart; the Raiders are a close second but the 49ers are the clear #1, and I can't help but root for them at all times.

2) While the 49ers are the masters of falling way behind and pulling off the 3-points-short comeback, the Raiders are grand masters of blowing slender 4th quarter leads even to shitty teams. Furthermore, I have suffered through enough Raider football over the last seven years to know they cannot be counted on to play two good games in a row, and until they prove otherwise, since they actually won last week I must conclude they are due to come in to Candlestick and lay an egg so big even Alex Smith can't fumble it away.