Make It Stop

For the length of my sports watching life, I have been a diehard Oakland Raider fan. While I’m from Dallas, the contrarian in me never allowed me to root for any popular team, including the Cowboys. Much to the chagrin of my family, I turned to the Raiders at an early age. I might as well have contracted leprosy. Back then family members would shake their heads in disgust and classmates refused to talk to me. Even now, coworkers and random people on the street speak to me as if I were retarded, unable to understand how a seemingly sane man could ever choose NOT to be a Cowboy fan.

Still, it was always fun to be a Raider fan, even during the terrible mid 90s. The Raiders represented a rebellious, outlaw spirit that was attractive to a kid like me that never wanted to do anything that everyone else was doing. The Raiders threw the ball a lot, something that has always been appealing to me. (Running game be damned.) Tim Brown was my favorite player and a local product. Even the colors were cool! There’s nothing more intimidating than the black and silver. Maybe even more importantly, being a Raider fan made me feel tough. When I attended a Raiders-Boys game in Dallas in my youth, I felt safe in a way that no fan of any other team feels in an opponent’s stadium. Every Raider fan was a scary dude. When heckled by a drunken Cowboy fan, a giant of a man, dressed head to toe in black with a look about him that suggested “this guy might kill someone today,” immediately came to my rescue. Being a Raider fan was like being a member of an incredibly exclusive (okay, maybe not so exclusive) club. Every guy has that one friend that makes everyone else in the group feel a little bit stronger and a little bit tougher when he’s around. That’s what it was like to be a Raider fan. Great power comes from being around a bunch of convicts dressed like Darth Vader on steroids, especially for a scrawny white kid who was unlikely to beat anyone in a fight.

Then the Raiders got good again. The Jon Gruden years brought incredible excitement. The team was not only slinging the ball around with reckless abandon, they were winning, too. Tim Brown, Jerry Rice, Rich Gannon, and their teammates were about as much fun to watch as I’ve seen in the NFL. They brought a certain finesse to a franchise that had always been lacking in that department. But the team still maintained its brigand-like mentality, an attitude that said, “Ya, we’ve got some nice guys on this team and sure, we look a little softer than we used to, but we’ll still pull your throats out to get a win.” It was a taste of the glory years that an entire generation of Raider fans had never experienced. This culminated in a trip to the 2003 Super Bowl, where Gannon and the boys were summarily dismissed by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and former coach Jon Gruden.

And then things went to pot.

The embarrassing ending to the 02 season pales in comparison to the debacle that has followed. The franchise has gone through four coaches and will soon find a fifth, since Al Davis apparently does not like Lane Kiffin, whom he hired less than one year ago. They’ve managed a combined record of 19-61. The team has made a series of terrible free agency signings, surpassed only by an even worse draft record. The Raiders are virtually non-competitive these days and it the future doesn’t look much brighter.

Since the beginning of free agency one week ago, the Raiders have made three major moves. First, they gave defensive tackle Tommy Kelly a 7 year contract. Who is Tommy Kelly, you ask? Well I’m a lifelong Raider fan and even I barely know who Kelly is. He’s a backup, at best, who will now be pulling in a Pro Bowler’s salary. Next the team signed Giant’s safety Gibril Wilson to a 6 year, 39 million dollar contract. Wilson is a nice player, a guy you can win with. But he’s worth about half of the more than 6 million bucks a year he’ll be collecting from the Raiders. And early this week, the Raiders took their collective stupidity to another level by signing wide out Javon Walker to a 6 year, 55 million dollar deal. Walker is a Pro Bowl player, a guy who, when healthy is a top 10 receiver in this league. The key word, though, is “healthy.” Walker missed the majority of last season with a new injury which came only two years after missing the entire year with a torn ACL. The chances of him returning to Pro Bowl form are slim to none. A lot of teams were interested in Walker but almost all of them were offering short term deals based on incentives. Walker had to be wondering if he was going to get his pay day. And then the Raiders swooped in with an ASININE offer that had to make Walker and his representatives burst into giddy, school girl-like laughter. I’m sure the moves will only continue to get worse as the draft approaches. In the last five seasons, it has become a near absolute that the Raiders will draft only the best athletes available with no regard to ability, character, position, or any of the other factors a well run organization will take into consideration before drafting a guy.

The root of the problem is owner Al Davis. I have a great deal of respect for Al and even his most vehement detractors have to acknowledge Davis’ contribution to the game. He has done a lot for the NFL as a whole and the way he built the organization was nothing short of brilliant. Unfortunately, the good days of Al’s life based him by a long, long time ago. The decisions he has made since Gruden left have to be considered the worst ever by an owner or GM not named Elgin Baylor. He has completely lost touch with reality and he obviously has no idea what today’s NFL is like. Heck, he may not know what year it is.

There are two reasonable explanations for Davis’ constant and embarrassing mistakes. The first is the idea that Davis is certifiably insane. The man may have seriously lost his mind over the last few years. It is quite possible that he is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Regardless, I think it’s highly likely that Davis’ mind is far from as sharp as it once was and he’s too egotistical to admit it. The other possibility is that Davis is, in fact, dead and no one has reported it yet. Maybe his brain has been transfused into a robot. Perhaps his head is frozen somewhere along with Ted Williams and a clone takes his place in the box. My favorite theory is that Davis has been dead for years but his children and staff were unsure of how to proceed. In the spirit of “Weekend at Bernie’s” they reanimated his body, turning him into a life size marionette doll, and now they take turns making decisions each day. This would explain why a coach is hired one year as a savior and fired the next after a mildly successful season. It would also explain why Norv Turner was ever given a job in the first place; apparently Al’s 8 year old granddaughter got to make that decision.

Whatever the case may be, the point is the franchise is in absolute ruin right now and there is only one thing Al can do about it: give it up. Unfortunately, that is probably the one thing Al is incapable of doing. His ego will never allow him to admit weakness, to acknowledge the fact that someone else is more qualified to make decisions than he. And so the Raider Nation continues to wallow in anguish, to subject themselves to the torturous pain that is every single Raider game. At one time the pride of the league, the franchise is in shambles, a disgrace to its once proud history in a way that only the New York Knicks can top. This has pushed me to the brink of, *gulp*, changing teams. Never before have I abandoned one of my teams and yet with each passing season, I find myself less and less interested in the disgrace of a team the Raiders throw out on the field each week. My only hope is that in George Steinbrenner fashion, Davis will see the light or be committed to a luxurious mental institution and turn the team over to someone else. Anyone else. At this point a trained bear would have a better chance of turning this thing around. Just someone, please, make it stop.