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This site is dedicated to the OAKLAND RAIDERS and the vertical attack strategy. Accept no substitutes!
No NFL team has a more storied history or has been involved in more thrilling and memorable games—the Heidi Game, the Immaculate Reception, the Sea of Hands, the Holy Roller, and George Blanda's Miracle Season, to name just a few.
But sad to say, there's also no NFL team that has imploded more frequently or had a more chronically dysfunctional coaching staff—a reflection to a considerable degree of the pervasive influence of its mercurial, highly idiosyncratic majority owner. In recent years chaos has come to be the rule rather than the exception. Since the team's return to Oakland it has not generally fared well, the one exception to that statement being an interlude during which the team played a style of football which is anathema to said owner and revisionist to everything Raiders history embodies.
Norv Turner came and went, and then Al Davis reached back into Raiders lore for a hire he thought could restore Oakland's fabled pride and poise—Art Shell. Alumni as diverse as Gene Upshaw and Jim Plunkett applauded Shell's appointment, and initially the players were enthusiastic about him too. "He demands accountability," went the player's chorus. But Shell's inability to coach today's players with yesteryear's methods doomed him almost from the start.
There's a reason we mention Shell specifically, and the good foot he got off on. Wunderkind Lane Kiffin, barely 32 years old, is enjoying his honeymoon right now in the same sort of way. Players are gushing with enthusiasm, starry-eyed fans are predicting the league's worst offensive line will—with few changes—suddenly turn dominant and lead a charge to an 8-8 or better season.
It's Pollyannish in the extreme. Kiffin's staff, for the most part, is long on enthusiasm and short on NFL experience. We shall see how effective his quarterback sprints are in a league with defensive ends who can run down most tailbacks. We shall see whether he is correct in buying the owner's blithe assessment that all last year's line problems had to do with the scheme and the coaches, and not in any way with a lack of talent among the linemen. Whether Kiffin, and the very large staff he has assembled—virtually every position coach has a full-time assistant—can re-energize and turn around the Raiders is an open question at this point. We're not against Lane Kiffin. We're simply not convinced yet that just because he's sure he knows what he's doing, that he's right in that opinion. The jury is out on this entire experiment.
This site reflects the views of an independent diehard Raiders fan of forty years who loves the team but wishes Al Davis would retire somewhere and take up golf. He has by all appearances ceded a remarkable amount of authority to Kiffin. How long that will continue if things don't go well this season is anyone's guess. We do hope to see Kiffin employ an offense that has a decent chance against the speed of real-life NFL defenses, and the cynic in us hopes he's not in over his head in his present job.
Go Raiders!
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 "[E]very player wants to be a Raider, and every fan is, in some level, a Raider
fan. . . . You have your current streaky, bandwagon, politically correct teams in the
league, but they and everyone else know that there has never been, and will never be a team more physical, more
intimidating, more intense, more football than the Raiders, ever![E]veryone is a Raider fan, and those who say they aren't, are filled with jealousy, envy, and are fooling themselves. . . . [A]nd quite frankly, Raider players and Raider fans, the best fans in the NFL, don't acknowledge the non-believers. . ." , |
Site last updated Thursday, May 8, 2008. First published Oct. 1, 1995. The Vertical GameTM is a solo effort maintained by David E. Brooks.
LEGAL STUFF: Not affiliated with or endorsed by the Oakland Raiders football team or the National Football League. All designs used on this site are and remain the intellectual property of the author. Except as otherwise attributed, all opinions expressed on this site are those of the author and the author solely. All articles online to which links are provided remain the property of their respective owners, and all product names which are service or registered trademarks remain the property of their respective holders. Blah blah blah . . .
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