For one Sunday, 49ers and Raiders are both better off than their opponents

It is difficult to imagine a less appealing weekend card for Bay Area NFL fans than this one – two organizations who do nothing particularly well except show their knickers for all to see.
 
And refreshingly, they are the opponents.
 
Not to brush away the problems in San Francisco and Oakland, mind you – the 49ers are just beginning a long and arduous rebuild, and the Raiders are trying to figure out what happened to theirs.
 
But perception, an iffy metric at best that leads to delusion more than anything else, tells us that there is no more euphoric time than when a team has hit bottom and is beginning the process of gathering energy for its subsequent bounce (49ers), and that a team that has shown signs of escaping its dysfunctions only to be confronted by new ones still has hope that they can be cleared up as the old ones were (Raiders).
 
In Chicago and New York, though, the freefall is hitting peak velocity without any sense that bottom has been hit yet, and as both Raider and 49er fans know, there is nothing more dispiriting.
 
The Bears are playing out a miserable string with John Fox as the head coach, and have already exhausted all the good will that typically comes with changing the quarterback (Mitchell Trubisky has not changed the team’s dreadful offense).
 
And the Giants are galactically worse, with the iconic quarterback, Eli Manning, past his sell-by date but still a sympathetic figure because of the way he has been demoted by the so very fired head coach Ben McAdoo. Owner John Mara has publicly vented about the mess the Giants have become and even though he is a hands-off owner is about to get very handsy indeed.
 
In other words, Bears fans and Giants fans hate their teams the way 49ers fans did two years ago and Raiders fans did three years ago, and now they are showing their rancid wares to people who know exactly how bad bad can be.
 
But I would remind you locals that this is no time for smugness. Jimmy Garoppolo has three plays from scrimmage under his belt here, and the Raiders are still grappling with their considerable limitations. Nothing is guaranteed.
 
But for one weekend, both the 49ers and Raiders are better off than the teams they face – much better off indeed. That, and beer, will make Sunday potentially pleasing for both fan bases, a change from most weeks when beer had to do the job alone.