There is something oddly cathartic about drama with YFT – Your Favorite Team. Your coach must be fired, or your quarterback stinks, or your designated diva is mouthing off to express his frustration at not being made more divatastic.
Yet the 49ers and Raiders have none of that, making it all the more difficult to muster a lot of energy toward either of them. The Raiders are in London as part of their annual attempt to pay down their debt to the owners who allowed them to move to Las Vegas, and San Francisco, who was going to be a staple of prime time and big-eyeball time slots this year because of Jimmy Garoppolo, are now the league’s leading flex bait.
And that’s not going to do much to keep either team’s fan bases from wandering off to better games (see Chiefs-Patriots) or weirder stories (whatever it is the Giants are doing with Eli Manning and Odell Beckham, Jr.) or even the past (the new Aaron Hernandez revelations from the Boston Globe about him being sexually abused as a child are even more chilling than anything that has come before).
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Part of it is is that neither team has a general manager or coach in employment trouble, or an owner who shares his thoughts about the team in weekly radio shows. In addition, the 49ers are mostly injured while the Raiders are mostly undertalented, and both teams are still in their rebuilding phases. The watchword either way in patience, in a sport which advertises every game as an event.
So what’s the event this week? Oakland has been banished to London to play the equally rebuilding Seattle Seahawks, with the principal story line being Marshawn Lynch’s glorious past. And the 49ers play Green Bay Monday night in a game against the injured Aaron Rodgers and the baffling Green Bay Packers which won’t feature snow.
In other words, the only lure is whether either team can get to the heady base camp of 2-4 – unless either team can break programming and create drama that hasn’t yet revealed itself.
For the Raiders, that would mean Jon Gruden finally snapping and ripping the roster, or announcing that Amari Cooper isn’t targeted because Derek Carr doesn’t believe in him, or Marshawn finally blowing off some steam before a tape recorder or camera. Don’t bet on any of them happening, but that’s about the only place this can go to change the current state of franchise-wide ennui.
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And the 49ers? The injuries insulate them from greater criticism but they also suck a lot of the hope out of the rest of the year. Every time someone sticks his head up to show signs of potential, it’s Whack-A-Mole – latest example, Matt Breida. If it weren’t for tight end George Kittle or quarterback C.J. Beathard’s survival skills, frankly, the 49ers would be utterly featureless on offense. And the defense is aggressively meh in all facets.
So there’s your drama. Maybe they can fail to fail, or maybe they can turn on each other, but in the meantime, you will live in stasis knowing that neither the Raiders are 49ers are going to demand the nation’s attention. For differing reasons, they are invisible, and invisible is the worst place to be in this sport.