What Raiders, 49ers had in common proves Bay Area can endure football

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Well, this much good happened on the last day of the 2018 football season, Bay Area Editions: The Oakland Raiders managed to finish their work in record time.
 
Their work, mind you, was to lose to the Kansas City Chiefs, which they did by turning the ball over the first four times they got it en route to a 35-3 mauling. The record time was two hours and thirty-seven minutes, which is ungodly fast for a game so formatted to get in all the possible advertisements that anything under three hours is an oddity, and anything under 2:40 is a game from 1967.
 
And if you want to be a pedant about it, it was the fastest game in nine years, the last being a tedio-spectacular between Jacksonville and New England won by the Patriots, 35-7, in 2009.
 
Now given that the 49ers played nearly an hour longer to lose to the Los Angeles Rams, 48-32, AND scored the last two touchdowns to make a rout look like a wacky circus, I guess that means that San Francisco was the superior team this year. Well, that and the fact that their most convincing win in five years had come against had come against the Raiders.
 
But there was plenty of very little for each team in 2018 as they extended their streak of non-winning combined records to 16 years, and there was something to be said for the fact that they were also 28th and 32nd against the point spread in 2018. In short, two public teams offended the public both in real life and BettingWorld.
 
But now that we all are clear on what happened, what happens next? I mean, other than the 49ers either picking second or trading down, and the Raiders picking fourth or trading in either direction?
 
Well, the Raiders need a place to play that is more developed than Bushrod Park, and the 49ers need to make Levi’s Stadium seem less like a furniture store on a rainy Saturday. The 49ers need to break in their new-old quarterback, Jimmy Garoppolo, and the Raiders need to decide if they can or want to move forward with the increasingly beleaguered Derek Carr.
 
After that, they both need to demonstrate that the Bay Area can still endure professional football. I mean, the Raiders are beating feet out of town soon enough, but the 49ers have spent their margin for error with John Lynch and Kyle Shanahan, and the 21st Century hasn’t been very useful for the Bay Area.
 
These were two once-mighty franchises rendered low, lower and below the horizon, and 2018 was the lowest in years. Both teams had injuries, personnel shortages and general malaise. They both won four games, and there is no way to make that seem like anything other than the eyesores they were.
 
And while we are no longer naïve enough to believe that the Raiders are going to be anything other than inertia embodied in 2019 as Gruden continues the teardown that preps the team for Las Vegas, the 49ers need to have the season in 2019 that 2018 was advertised to be rather than what 20-17 ended up being. Shanahan is 3-19 in months other than December (and the team 7-38 since Jim Harbaugh was shown the front gate), which is Hue Jacksonian no matter what excuse you apply, and those fans who still will have a team in two years are wearying of being spoilers before Halloween.
 
We’d like to tell you that things are going to get better for both teams in 2019, but we thought that in 2018, 2017 and 2016, too. Selling hope to dispirited customers is how big-box scores went bankrupt, so it’s probably psychologically safer to sit back and wait for this alleged improvement to happen. Hey, it worked for the Warriors.

[RELATED: What we learned in 49ers season-ending loss to Rams]
 
But credit where its due. The Raiders knew what the audience wanted Sunday, and gave it to them -- a quick hello-and-goodbye and an early flight home to fearfully contemplate Jon Gruden’s second offseason. Their offseason might not be fun, but at least it started sooner.
 

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