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OAKLAND — Are the Raiders a good team?

You’d be hard-pressed to say that they are, particularly after Sunday’s wholly uninspiring 24-17 win over the lowly New York Giants, led by Geno Smith.

Good teams don’t let the Giants hang around like they did Sunday. Good teams aren’t that careless with the ball. Good teams don’t let Smith look like a borderline competent NFL quarterback.

So, are the Raiders a bad team?

You can’t say that either. Bad teams don’t put up 401 yards of total offense without their top two wide receivers in a must-win game. Bad teams don’t shut down the opposing run game. Bad teams don’t have Khalil Mack making plays on the defensive side of the ball and Marshawn Lynch ripping off 51-yard touchdown runs on the other side.

No, these Raiders are somewhere in the middle.

Call it what you want — mediocre, average, middling — that’s what the Raiders are.

Oh, and they’re also in a tie for first place in the AFC West.

What a strange season it has been so far.

This Raiders team might not look like a playoff contender on the field, but through good luck and opportunistic play, they are one in the standings, and that’s all that matters.

And no matter how uninspiring this squad might be, no matter how inconsistent their play is, with four games to play, they are in total and complete control of their own playoff destiny.

“It’s just right in front of us. It’s there. Everything we want to do is right there,” Derek Carr said after Sunday’s win. “The NFL… crazy.”

At least I wasn’t the only one thinking this season has been insane.

Remember: It was fair to write the Raiders off after their embarrassing loss to Buffalo. It was justifiable to say that this team didn’t have what it takes after being blown out by the Patriots in Mexico City.

Has this Raiders team really improved since then? What’s changed?

Yes, the pass rush looks better over the last two games. And yes, the run game has been more forceful over the last two contests as well (Lynch has 43 carries in the Raiders’ back-to-back wins).

The last two games could make you believe that this team — talented but flawed — is figuring things out at the perfect time.

Or perhaps they’ve played two dysfunctional teams that will probably fire their head coaches in the coming weeks and will probably pick in the top-five at NFL Draft, all while the Chiefs have completely imploded after a 5-1 start.

Doesn’t it stand to reason that the real reason Oakland is tied for first place is that the landscape around them has changed while they have remained the same team?

That’s not a good thing. It’s not bad, either. It’s somewhere in the middle of all of that — just like the Raiders.

Credit where it’s due: The Raiders’ offense did put the lowly Giants away with two fourth-quarter touchdowns (and unlike when the Giants lost the 49ers a few weeks ago, they seemed to be trying to stop Oakland Sunday). That was a new, positive development.

But Sunday’s game had all the makings of a bloodbath — Lynch’s touchdown run in the first quarter should have been a tone-setting play that established the Raiders as the alpha. But instead of the Raiders coming out strong and putting the Giants away before halftime (as they could have done), they followed Lynch’s 51-yard touchdown run with three quarters of “meh” play before finding it in themselves to win the game in the fourth quarter, which opened with a 10-7 score.

That kind of performance won’t fly next week against Kansas City (no matter how dysfunctional that operation seems at the moment), or in the final three games of the season against Dallas, Philadelphia, and the Chargers.

The Raiders can’t use good fortune to make the playoffs — against four good teams, they’ll have to show they’re worthy of the postseason by winning.

Now, the standard for success might not be that high — 8-8 might win the embarrassing AFC West. But if the Raiders are a “growing” team, as was claimed by many the post-win glow — a team that should be taken seriously by the rest of the league and not just an average team in a worse-than-mediocre division that has one team on the ascent, one team in free-fall, and one team remaining steady (in the macro; it’s by no means smooth on the field) — then they’ll need to prove it by winning in Kansas City for the first time since 2012.

Being average has gotten the Raiders this far — a lot farther than any reasonable person should have expected.

But now they need do something they’ve failed to do all year: prove that they’re more than average.