There is no longer any reason to be annoyed by the San Francisco 49ers, but there is growing reason to be completely baffled by the Oakland Raiders.



In other words, the difference between a genuinely bad team and a tantalizingly mediocre one is now clear.



The 49ers are easy to understand. They win rarely, when they do it is a surprise, and when they do not, it's because they have been roughly handled – yes, even by teams as chemical spill-y as the Cleveland Browns. Any positive narratives you might construct about them are now revealed to be fraudulent promises of something that cannot reasonably be.



In other words, if you want to have hope between now and the end of the season, your delusions are yours alone, and when you find people backing away from you slowly, you’ll know the reason. They lost, 24-10, and were lucky it wasn’t far worse.

[MAIOCCO: Tomsula: 'That’s as bad a feeling in sports as you can have']



As for the Raiders, their 15-12 victory over the Denver Broncos came because their richly maligned defense played one of its best games in years, and because the on-again, off-again linebacker Khalil Mack had the game of his career. They are still 6-7, two games south of the last AFC playoff berth, and two of the three teams ahead of them, Kansas City and Pittsburgh, hold tiebreaker advantages against them. To call them a postseason longshot is to redefine “long.” And “shot,” for that matter.

[RECAP: Instant Replay: Raiders rally back for wild upset in Denver]



But they are capable of entertainment, skilled at making fans long beaten down think of a rosier future (even if it happens to be in another city, which remains a very open question a month before the next owners meetings).



They remain frustratingly inconsistent – their first half Sunday was the worst by an offense going back at least a quarter-century, but they can still torture their betters (and yes, Denver is still one of their betters). General manager Reggie McKenzie has turned a fan base that swore he was working as a spy for every other team into a cabal of loyalists who now understand how much of a stable-quality mess he’d been handed.



And frankly, even though theirs is a largely quixotic chase between now and January 3, their remaining games will be far more interesting than San Francisco’s. Based solely on the available tickets on StubHub for each team’s final two home games, the Raiders are only one half as repellent as the 49ers, and this is a gratifying development insofar as it means that people are not only paying attention, they are wisely figuring out when not to pay attention any more.



In short, just as they may be packing to leave, they are now serving as a better representative for Bay Area football fans than the team that is staying.



We won’t know whether the Raiders are Oakland’s for good or only through the holidays until January 12-13, when the oligarchs gather in Houston to divvy up Southern California. But whatever their fate, they have become by far the more interesting and enjoyable watch. The 49ers are now nothing but a small red speck in their rear-view mirror.

Figuratively, and perhaps literally.