SAN FRANCISCO -- That the San Francisco 49ers are telling us they could play in Oakland, while the Oakland Athletics are more than hinting they want to play in San Jose might not make sense to people back in the rust belt. Yet it's perfectly logical to us demented folk along the Pacific.

We've never looked at things as others have. After all, California was settled by Spaniards who then got conquered by people who rode covered wagons across deserts and 7,500-foot mountains thinking they would get rich.

What they got was buckboard splinters in their fannies. And some said, mush in the brains.

Rudyard Kipling, the author, went through these parts roughly a century ago and stayed long enough to decide, "San Francisco is a mad city, inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people.''

And that was before Al Davis drafted JaMarcus Russell.

Davis, you may be aware, once moved the Oakland Raiders to Los Angeles and then in a fit of pique in 1995 moved them back to Oakland, where in the 2002 season they made it to the Super Bowl and haven't done anything since.

Nor have the 49ers, who not very long ago, the 1980s and early 1990s, were the benchmark of pro football success.

Now they are the benchmark of mediocrity, although their coach, Mike Singletary, refuses to acknowledge such reality, saying he likes his players. As if he could say anything else.

Both the Raiders and Niners had the first pick in the draft within the last five years, and both selected quarterbacks, neither of whom has done much except make people wonder who could have been taken instead.

JaMarcus Russell of the Raiders moved the meter from "Hopeless'' to "How did this Happen?'' when Sunday he got off the bench where he had been placed three games before and led the winning drive against Denver.

The same afternoon, Alex Smith of the 49ers, No. 1 in '05, who had been making progress, threw three interceptions against Philly, ending any thoughts he would be another Joe Montana.

The Niners do have a chance not to have their first losing season in seven years, but they must win their final two games, and since those games are against the two teams with the worst records in the NFL, in order the Detroit Lions and the St. Louis Rams, the odds are good.

Sport in Northern California is a mess these days, particularly on the far side of the Bay Bridge, the area the late Herb Caen pejoratively labeled "The mysterious East Bay.''

Of the six pro franchises in the region, only the San Jose Sharks - they play hockey, if you care - and San Francisco Giants have reached a level of competency. And the three teams who perform either indoors or outdoors at the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum Complex, the Raiders, Athletics the Golden State Warriors are notably ineffective. Nowhere else in America is there such a large collective degree of dysfunction on such a small plot of land.

To persuade the Raiders to return to Oakland, government officials had the Coliseum, at the time a functional baseball park if not a particularly memorable one, expanded and redesigned for football.

That made the A's unhappy, because the place was too big. First they put tarps on the third deck and then they began a campaign for a new ballpark. In Fremont, which is about 20 miles south of Oakland and halfway to nowhere.

Now the A's want to shift to San Jose, another 35 miles down the Interstate. But the Giants insist they hold the territorial rights to San Jose, and are demanding the A's and San Jose knock it off.

Meanwhile, in Santa Clara, next to San Jose, the 49ers are hustling a new stadium of their own, the probability of which is improbable, as also is the thought the Niners might construct a new home next to their decaying old one, Candlestick Park.

So, Jed York, who replaced his father John as Niners president, then steps forward and says his team would share a new stadium in Oakland with the Raiders, if one is built next to the current Coliseum.

"Oakland has the location and the infrastructure,'' was the justification of Jed York. "It's right on the freeway and has BART (rapid transit) access. It just makes more sense.''

If something makes sense in Northern California it isn't going to happen.