Call it favoritism, if you want. Call it practicality. Delusion. Or pure, agonizing, long-term faith.

No question, the San Francisco 49ers’ brass has strong and complicated feelings about Alex Smith and his training-camp competition with Shaun Hill for the starting-quarterback nod.
The 49ers want to be fair, as opposed to last summer’s J.T. O’Sullivan rigged pick. They want the best quarterback to win. They want that to be determined on the field of play, starting Saturday.
And, almost assuredly, several 49ers front-office heavy hitters want and expect the winner to be Smith, who seems healthy at last.
It’s natural that this would be true, given Smith’s obvious talent, his run of bad luck and disappointment since he was the No. 1 overall pick in 2005 and the time and money already invested in him.
Does Coach Mike Singletary, who, I seem to recall, WANTS WINNERS, also slightly lean toward Smith over the blue-collar, persistently under-valued Hill?
Singletary recently noted that unsigned rookie receiver Michael Crabtree has been doing good pre-camp work with Smith (not Hill).
If Singletary was thoroughly satisfied with Hill, he wouldn’t have signed off on the team’s spurned pursuit of Kurt Warner in March.
And if all was absolutely equal, Singletary probably wouldn’t have described the quarterback competition this way earlier this week:
“We’ve got a guy that has come off the bench and won some football games,” Singletary said, which is not exactly a trumpet blare for Hill, 7-3 as a 49ers starter.
“(And) we’ve got a guy (in Smith) that really, in my mind, hasn’t had the opportunity, the right opportunity, to excel, find out what he can be.”
It isn’t difficult to parse Singletary’s description of Smith, who is 11-19 and hasn’t played a down of football since September 2007.
Given the right opportunity — and not an unending string of new offensive coordinators, a wrecked shoulder and a silly cold war initiated by former coach Mike Nolan — Smith is a tough talent to ignore.
Smith, still only 25, solidified the positivity by turning in the best practice performances of his 49ers career at the May workouts.
“Probably yeah, I would imagine this is the best I’ve felt since I’ve been here,” Smith said Monday.
Smith is healthy. He can make all the throws. Hill is “. . . precisely what he showed last season: gutsy and instinctive, but there are many throws in the NFL playbook that he simply cannot make.
That’s why this can still be a fair contest, even if new offensive coordinator Jimmy Raye is close to Norv Turner, under whom Smith had his best pro success in 2006.
The 49ers want to see Smith at his best in August. If he’s not, if something goes awry again, the fair contest goes to Hill.
“I don’t get any idea of favoritism for either of us,” Smith said. “I think this has been totally legit since we’ve started it. I don’t think it would be any other way with Coach Singletary.”
The way it’s shaping, if the competition is close or tied after the first two exhibition games, Smith will have under-performed in the heat of battle.
That is the test Smith hasn’t yet passed as a pro — with the “bullets flying,” as both Smith and Singletary have described it.
Can he convince the locker room that he’s ready to get hit, get up, and make plays? His teammates aren’t 100 percent convinced of it now, I can tell you that.
“The most important thing is the day that we make that decision is that they know as well as the coaches and our players, we all know who it is,” Singletary said. “And it’s not one of those things, ’Man . . . well . . . We’ll go with Alex.’
“No, we’re not going to guess at it.”
Singletary knows what he’ll get out of Hill. He knows he’d like more out of his quarterback. He doesn’t yet know what he can get out of Smith.
And, as it has been for most of the past five seasons of 49ers football, that again is the fair and burning question of the summer.