– I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar.
The huge and diverse black-painted extended family of the Oakland Raiders mourns the passing of its godfather, as Al Davis moves on from this life to terrorize some higher plane of existence. No doubt he has already offered to hire St. Peter away from the gate, and is heckling God to merge Heaven and Hell into a single league, which he will then move to Los Angeles. (Los Angeleans will not notice a significant difference.)
The legacy that Al Davis leaves behind, as an offensive innovator from the Sid Gilman coaching tree, and as a Fred Sanford of franchise building — taking the league’s unwanted junk and fashioning misfits into a fearsome force — is undeniable. His insistence on running his team his own way helped build his fanbase into a rebel alliance, united in their “us against the world” attitude.
It also alienated his own coaches, players, and fans, as his methods increasingly diverged from those of modern, winning teams. “Al Davis knows football,” said the always outspoken Warren Sapp. “It’s just 60’s and 70’s football. You take him out, put him at home watching film or whatever he is doing — you have a functioning football organization.”
Indeed, the glory days of the Raider franchise came in those early decades of the post-merger era of the NFL. Before advanced video analysis, the West Coast offense, the salary cap, and myriad defensive innovations began leaching the strength from Davis’ football foundation. Modern NFL teams had a power structure as broad and ultra-specialized as the modern military, but Davis ran his team like a platoon of Marines, with all decisions — even on gameday — still flowing through him.
To be a Raider fan in the last decade meant accepting that your team was just different from the others. It meant suffering through painfully stale “Just win, baby!” jokes from fans of any of the league’s other teams. To be a Raider fan meant accepting that your team just wasn’t going to win, baby.
I lived in Oakland for a couple of years during the “Chucky” era, when the brash young Jon Gruden demanded (and earned) the ability to at least partially control the direction of the team. In a way, he followed some of the old Davis precepts to a tee, taking an old misfit quarterback in Rich Gannon, and devising an offense around his bootleg ability, his field vision, and his weak-but-accurate arm. Don’t tell Davis this, but it was essentially his arch-rival Bill Walsh’s West Coast offense cloaked in silver in black.
Gruden successfully recaptured some of the old Raider glory. But Davis couldn’t accept any perceived loss of his control of the franchise, and shipped the coach off to Tampa. Then he stewed as Gruden pulled one last page from Davis’ book, as the team Gruden built met the team he was now coaching in the Super Bowl. Chucky stood in at quarterback in the Bucs’ pre-Super Bowl practices and taught his defense all of the Raiders’ offensive calls before the game. Then he laughed as the Bucs ran roughshod over the Raiders, who had never bothered to change the playbook.
The loss seemed to send Davis over the edge. He changed coaches six times in the next ten years, importing and exporting talent at will, and generally holding his fan base hostage to his increasingly unpredictable whims.
Like any losing team, attendance at the Oakland Coliseum suffered with the team’s sufferings, even as the die-hards filled the Black Hole in the south end zone week after week. Hope finally began to emerge in the last two years, as the team finally rid itself of Jamarcus Russel and let team leaders emerge in Richard Seymour and Darren McFadden. They went 6-0 in the AFC West, but in typical Raider fashion, managed to not win the division or make the playoffs.
Now that he’s gone, the Raider fans who truly want to win can breathe a sigh of relief. But the fanbase as a whole, the rebel alliance, loses its driving force of uniqueness. Whatever shape the Raiders take, they will become a bit more like the rest of the teams in the NFL, and a bit less like themselves. There can never be another Al Davis.
