From Thoughts from the Dark Side:
Hall of Fame member Al Davis
Today while talking with a fellow writer (who I won’t name), he mentioned that the Oakland Raiders were horrible over the last five years because Al Davis was a detriment to the team. He, of course, mentioned that because of Al Davis there was a level of dysfunction within the Oakland Raiders that was laughable to nearly every fan around the league.
It’s not that Raider Nation completely disagrees with this assessment. My friend made sure that I knew that over the past five years Al Davis has destroyed the Raiders and the reputation that they used to have, but I disagree. Mistakes have surely been made, and I’ll be the first to mention them. He’s the boss and by his standards of operation, he may agree that he’s failed over the past five years. Because of this, my colleague wanted to know why Raiders fans were so quick to defend him…including me.
First things first, I don’t defend him when I think that he’s made the wrong choices or bad decisions. There are times that I don’t agree with what he’s doing, and I find that I’m right about this less than I’m wrong. This is why you have to judge him by all other owners and not his legend. Because of this, I’ll tell you why I still think that Al Davis fully capable, and still better than most in his position, I understand the things he’s done and I understand why he’s done them.
Getting rid of Chucky
Al has his faults. He’s vain, he’s controlling, and he’s tight with his money. The fact of the matter is that Gruden wasn’t going to re-sign with the Raiders for the pittance that he was getting paid at the time. Ok, somewhere in the neighborhood of a cool $1 million a year isn’t minimum wage, but for a coach that’s just taken your team to two straight playoffs after a six year drought should get the going rate. That going rate was an even cooler $4 million.
Is there an owner out there with the creativity or the cajones to trade the most popular coach in all of football for his next coaches salary and four top draft picks? Before you answer, realize that Tagliabue had to make up yet another rule to prevent this from ever happening again. They call the NFL a copy cat league, but that’s only referring to winning and completely getting over on the competition. As Mr. Davis would put it, “That’s domination baby!”
Looking back, it’s easy to say that the Raiders would’ve been better off keeping Chucky. Since the Buccaneers beat the Raiders in the Super Bowl, they are 36-44, have two out of five winning seasons and one of them was a 9-7 season. That doesn’t spell John Madden to me, and that record is with former executive of the year Bruce Allen getting him talent like he did in Oakland.
The Case for Callahan
By the time that Davis knew he wasn’t going to get an extension from Gruden, he had already lost valuable time. Rather than going into the 2002 season with a lame duck coach, he made the move to trade him. Dennis Green was the front runner for coaches from outside of the organization, but isn’t he always?
The Raiders had just lost the ‘Tuck’ game, but they’d won the division for the second straight season and the offense was beginning to become formidable. Most of the credit for this went to Gruden, but what was overlooked was that the offensive line had improved from letting up 67 sacks in Callahan’s first year as the coach in 1998 to only 27 in 2001.
The choice was to continue what John Gruden had started, so in that case the only two candidates were Bill Callahan and Chuck Bresnahan, the defensive coordinator. Just a little thing you should know about Al, he’s not going to reward you when your defense wasn’t able to close out a game you had full control of in the playoffs, tuck or no tuck. It also helped that players like Tim Brown were more than eager to take a meeting with Davis to endorse Callahan.
Callahan took the Raiders farther than any coach since Tom Flores, but failed to win the Super Bowl. Let me reiterate that when you get to the big game, Davis is much less forgiving of losses. John Rauch had a near perfect season in 1967 and lost the Super Bowl, causing Davis to visit many practices until the coach quit. Nobody really knows what happened behind closed doors, but in Callahan’s second season, he was no longer coaching to stay with the Raiders.
I’ll say it, since many of the players from that team (including Jerry Rice and Rod Woodson) have said it or intimated it, he tanked the season in hopes of getting fired. You can’t judge Davis for that. Quitting on your team, your organization, and yourself is a personal decision and is not the fault of the boss, but the employee.
The Case for Norv Turner
On the heels of a coach showing no respect for the organization or for winning, Mr. Davis needed to find someone that cared about the Oakland Raiders. What was evident at the end of the Callahan era was that the team was in complete turmoil. Many of the young up and coming players from previous drafts were malcontent and looking to get out. Veterans such as Frank Middleton and Charles Woodson were vocal in their displeasure with the organization as a whole.
Bill Belichick had just won his second Super Bowl. He wasn’t very good in his first go-round as a head coach with the Browns. In fact, he was practically run out of Cleveland and now he’s winning Super Bowls. Al Davis has never been afraid of copying success and most likely saw this as a plus for his candidate. The Chargers had risen to power in the AFC West and he needed a coach that could figure out how to stop Ladanian Tomlinson, but the coach also had to be able to breathe life back into the offense which had dropped from first in the league to 25th.
In steps Norv Turner. Turner had grown up a Raiders fan, this was his dream job so there was no doubt that he would care as much as Davis about winning. Like Belichick, he was considered by many the top coordinator in the game and had been run out of DC in his first stint as a head coach. He had coached Ladanian Tomlinson in 2001 and the Chargers were still running his offense. He had just finished making over the Dolphins offense just as he recently did in San Francisco, so to Davis this was the right hire.
Many, including myself, worried about this decision, but the majority of the media along with fans of the Raiders saw this as a good hire. Looking back on it now, it’s easy to criticize especially since Dennis Green ended up going to Arizona in the same season.
The Case for Art Shell
In Norv Turner’s second season, is was evident that he either didn’t have the backbone to get fired on his own terms or that Al Davis was making all of the coaching decisions. Randy Moss and Jerry Porter seemed to be working well together, but the play of Kerry Collins consistently underscored the lack of discipline on the team.
The Raiders couldn’t run the ball, had no discipline on the offensive line, were at or near the top of the league in penalties, but still had the tenth best passing game despite 45 sacks and countless missed opportunities in or near the redzone. They had a defense that was poor at stopping the run and was inconsistent in stopping the pass. What the Raiders needed was a coach that would come in and take this sub par group and toughen them up.
A concern for Davis had to be lingering from the Chucky coaching vacancies and Callahan giving up, and with the passing weapons that had vertical game written all over it, he needed a coach that could help strengthen the running game and still make the attempts at the long pass. He also needed to hire someone that would still care as much as he felt Norv had.
His failure was his hesitation in an active coaching search. With that hesitation came Mike Lombardi’s initiative in trying to land Bobby Petrino as the next head coach. In the end, he was left rehashing the good memories of Art Shell’s last stint with the Raiders, while forgetting why he fired him in the first place.
It was Shell’s toughness and discipline that Al Davis thought would turn his team around, but he forgot to remember that it was Tom Walsh that got Shell fired in his last go-round, and allowed the coach to re-hire Walsh as his offensive coordinator. Besides the Walsh hiring, the coaching staff was pretty good. Most notably, the hiring of Irv Eatman and Jackie Slater as offensive line coaches seemed to be brilliant. Who better to turn this offensive line around than two hall of fame offensive linemen and a pretty good line coach in Eatman.
We all know how that ended. Was he wrong to bring Shell back? Now it’s very easy to see that it was. Had he hired Petrino, would that have been better? Petrino was the guy everyone thought was a top candidate and thanks to him, Greg Knapp, Tom Rathman, Tom Cable, Justin Griffith, and DeAngelo Hall are all Raiders.
The Case for the top draft picks
In 2002, he had two seasons before he’d be forced to make a decision on Charles Woodson’s next contract. Eric Allen had retired, and Tory James was now on the other side and wasn’t considered a top corner. There was a weakness in the Raiders nickle and dime coverage and their return game still wasn’t what they’d hoped it would be. It was logical to draft the most exciting return man in the draft who also happened to be a prolific corner in college, Phillip Buchanon. I cringe typing that now.
The next pick was Napoleon Harris, who was picked to increase the speed at the linebacking position. It later turned out that he was drafted to replace Greg Biekert, who’d been the heart and soul of an overachieving defense in recent years. Harris developed and had a decent first year as the Raiders went to the Super Bowl and had a much faster defense than they had prior to Harris joining the unit.
In 2003, the Raiders needed another defensive end with Tony Bryant breaking his neck in 2002. With Tory James leaving for a big contract, Buchanon being inconsistent, and Woodson’s needing to be franchised at the end of the season because they couldn’t agree to a new contract, the Raiders also needed another corner. They also needed a safety since the other Woodson, Rod, was nearing retirement.
The Raiders drafted Nnamdi Asomugha, considered a huge stretch at the time by most draft aficionados like myself who not only played safety, but had cornerback speed. He then drafted Tyler Brayton, considered a minor but necessary stretch at the time.
In 2004, 99% of all fans and draft prognosticators couldn’t see the Raiders draft anyone besides Gallery with their second overall pick. Had Turner had the guts to put Gallery in at left tackle right away, we might not be shaking our heads every time his name comes up.
In 2005, with Buchanon being shipped out with the ‘Bust’ tag attached, Charles Woodson signing an enormous franchise tag contract, and only Nnamdi Asomugha as the cornerback of the future who hadn’t made a single interception in two seasons, Al Davis made a bold statement by drafting Fabian Washington and Stanford Routt in the first and second rounds.
In 2006, another top defensive back was added, but was necessary since the Raiders had nobody but Stuart Shweigert at free safety. The Raiders chose Huff over Leinart, and draft gurus were up in arms over the decision. This story still has another year or two to play out before anything can be determined.
The Truth About Rumors
There’s no doubt in my mind that there has probably been some truth to the rumors that we constantly hear associated with the Raiders and Al Davis. What strikes me odd about many of the rumors and stories is that when the ‘oppressed’ former subjects of Al Davis are free of the so-called silver and black chains, mum is the word.
My challenge is for anyone to bring me sources and quotes from John Gruden, Bruce Allen, Bill Callahan, and Norv Turner backing any of this up. Where’s Joe Bugel’s, Mike White’s, Tom Flores’, and John Madden’s quotes to back up these stories we hear so much about?
Jim Fassel has been an assistant coach for Davis’ teams in the past and was hoping to land the head coaching job prior to Kiffin being signed. John Fox stormed out of the Raiders facility and quit as defensive coordinator prior to the 1996 season, but I’ve never seen a quote attributed to him saying anything negative about the Raiders or Al Davis.
So often, we hear about the Bill Walsh coaching tree, but outsiders forget that Bill Walsh was part of the Al Davis coaching tree. The Packers great years of the 90’s were attributed to Ron Wolf, who got plenty of tutoring as a Raiders personnel executive for 21 years. A look throughout the league will find many with silver and black ties including the hated Mike Shanahan which leads me to ask, was Davis wrong to hire him? One has to wonder how a former Raiders middle linebacker turned TV commentator was hired to be the GM of an organization without any experience.
Oh, I’m not saying that people don’t have bad things to say about the Raiders or the organization. Mike Lombardi, who may have an axe to grind, has been more than diplomatic with questions given to him about the Raiders organization and Al Davis. The worst thing that I’ve heard or read him say about the Raiders regarded the draft room, “almost no computers, it’s like going back in time, real quiet and no distractions, no television, it’s surreal.” Makes you wonder how they’ve been able to make sane draft day decisions. I should add that in the same breathe Lombardi revealed that Davis had information about every pick stored in his head. On a scale of one to ten where ten is the worst thing you could say about Davis, I had to give that a five.
The Case for Davis
While he’s volatile, controlling, vain, and whatever adjective you want to throw in there it’s undeniable that nobody wants to win as much as Al Davis. For all of his failings of the past, as well as his successes, you always know that the only thing that matters to the man is winning.
Is there an owner in the league that knows more about football? NO
Is there an owner in the league that doesn’t control the team? NO
Is there an owner in the league that doesn’t get involved with personnel decisions? FEW if any
Is Al Davis the only owner that’s hands on? NO
Is there anyone that wants to win more than Al Davis? NO
Have the Raiders been successful since Al Davis took over? YES
So why do people single out Al Davis as the worst owner in sports? ???
