The phone calls and emails keep coming, as do discussions with
friends and acquaintances. Sports-shriek radio shows are piercing
eardrums across the Bay Area. The dialogue tells a tale of what can
happen to a football fan’s patience after eight years of abuse. It
can completely disappear, gone as yesterday’s glass of water
Monte Poole, The Oakland Tribune
The phone calls and emails keep coming, as do discussions with friends and acquaintances.
Sports-shriek radio shows are piercing eardrums across the Bay Area.
The dialogue tells a tale of what can happen to a football fan’s patience after eight years of abuse.
It can completely disappear, gone as yesterday’s glass of water.
A combined 16 unsatisfying seasons, coming after a historical pattern of achievement, explain why the 49ers and Raiders now have such tiny margins of faith. They’ve been so bad, for so long — neither has had a winning season in eight years — the first signs of failure in Year 9 remind us of the ugly past.
And those post-traumatic signs appeared Sunday, two games into the 2011 season, after both teams lost games good teams generally win.
Spirits of both fan bases nose-dived. Panic skyrocketed. One friend wanted to fire Raiders cornerback Chris Johnson, another wanted to surround 49ers linebacker Patrick Willis with an entirely new defense.
I get it. Folks were hurting, and folks in pain tend to lash out. We should allow them the space and time to vent.
We also should remind them the season is two weeks old. And that each team’s 1-1 record reflects its respective place in the current NFL; neither the 49ers nor the Raiders are as good as they were at their best Sunday, or as bad as they were at their worst.
Furthermore, it’s patently unfair in September to reach conclusions about any team — except maybe the wounded Chiefs, who clearly must improve to become awful.
One wicked Sunday, with the Raiders and 49ers so impressive until becoming utterly helpless in the decisive moments, has opened the door to agitation, frustrating players on both teams and, more to the point, stirring up their fans.
Those same results, though, could accelerate the evaluation process of each rookie coach. Oakland’s Hue Jackson and San Francisco’s Jim Harbaugh each has his first crossroads event, an opportunity to indicate whether he can prove a sturdier and more effective manager than his discarded predecessors.
“We didn’t finish a football game that we had an opportunity to win,” Jackson said. “We need to get better. We will get better. And we’ll start that process on Wednesday.”
Said Harbaugh: “We are in a process. I know everybody wants to solve the debt today, but that is something that is a process.”
That applies to both teams, as they return to practice the next three days. Can either heal and prepare to deal? The Raiders, after two road games, return home to greet the New York Jets. The Niners, after two home games, go to Cincinnati to play the Bengals.
The 49ers and Raiders were impressive in the early going last week. They were in position to make strong positive statements about themselves. Two first-year coaches opening with successive wins sends a clear signal that improvement is on the horizon, that it is, at last, a new day.
Now, in the wake of stinging defeats, they don’t have a choice. There is no latitude.
If the 49ers go on the road and win, hope rises. If they win impressively, hope soars.
A Raiders win over a contender such as the Jets would invite Oakland’s fans to dream.
A loss for either, and we won’t be able to avoid the flashbacks. We’ll question the coaches and their rosters, question the priorities of the owners. We’ll wonder how many more years before, maybe, we see another winner.
It’s natural to question and wonder when 8-8 is the best that either team has managed since 2002. And we’re talking about a 49ers franchise that was reliably elite in the 1980s and ’90s. We’re talking about a Raiders franchise that spent the 1970s and ’80s backing up its braggadocio.
We’ll need more than two games apiece to discover if Harbaugh, 47, has any more to offer than Mike Singletary or Mike Nolan or Dennis Erickson — or if Jackson, 45, will be an improvement over Tom Cable, Lane Kiffin, Art Shell, Norv Turner or Bill Callahan.
Both Jackson and Harbaugh are brimming with optimism and confidence. Both expect spectacular success. As natural quarterbacks — Jackson played the position in college, Harbaugh in college and the NFL — both always believe they can win the game.
Both are trying to stop the losing, and both have a reasonable chance to succeed. Both also will discover losing is an exceedingly hard habit to break.
Meanwhile, we watch them tackle the big job of restoring crumbling monuments.
As they work, you envision the finished product and want to see weekly progress. When there is a visible setback, you see is the mess. You see the ugly past. And the finished product seems ever more distant.
