Pride: The Autopsy of A Lost Season

Pride is woven into the fabric of the Oakland Raiders experience. It constitutes half of the team’s signature slogan: Pride and Poise. I now submit to you that pride, more than anything else, was our undoing in 2006.

This is probably the hardest take I’ve ever written. I admit that some of it is speculative. I fear that it will come across more negatively than intended. So why bother? Because I think it’s important that we sift carefully through the wreckage of 2006. In order to determine where we’re going, we should first try to understand exactly how we got here.

Here’s my condensed take on the 2006 season, from the promising start to the ugly end: Al Davis, told by so many that his methodology and philosophy were outmoded, was determined to prove otherwise. Knowing that time might be short at his age, and being a man of great pride, Mr. Davis went back to the future in pursuit of one last blaze of glory. He seized a golden opportunity to prove the naysayers wrong in the clearest way possible: he hired Raiders legend and ex-Raiders coach Art Shell to pilot the team’s firmly stated return to classic old-school Raiders football. Along the way, however, personnel shortcomings were grossly overlooked. These shortcomings were compounded by the hiring of offensive coaches with outdated resumes or marginal NFL coaching experience. The result was a combustible mix of player and coaching issues that imploded into chaos and incompetence on the offensive side of the ball.

Let’s not sugarcoat the situation. Our offense wasn’t merely bad or awful. It was biblically impotent and incoherent. One touchdown scored in the last 16 quarters of the season. No more than 22 points in a single game. The 20-point barrier broken only four times (one of which, the Steelers game, had nothing to do with the offense). Twelve total touchdowns on offense. Six games with single-digit scoring. Three shutouts. If you’re not utterly scandalized by these statistics, you’d better make sure you still have a pulse. Worst of all, our offense was so atrocious that it more than cancelled out significant strides on defense.

From the beginning, the 2006 season would live or die upon the aforementioned premise of pride. It was gutsy. It was also very risky. Live by the sword, die by the sword. But that’s what I like about Al Davis. He enjoys a swordfight. If it had worked, it would have been absolutely brilliant. Can you imagine if the Raiders had enjoyed a turnaround like the Jets and Saints? It would have been the ultimate sharp stick in the eye of the Raiders Haters. Personally, I salivated over the prospect. The problem is that it didn’t work, and now this original premise of pride, in retrospect, looks like a trap—one that blinded the team to its own intensifying shortcomings in matters of talent and chemistry and, later, coaching.

Here’s what Art Shell said in July: “This is the Al Davis system. You've got to understand something. I grew up in this system. This is a system that allows us to attack from any place on the football field. Again, you've got to have the players to do that, and we feel we have the players to do that. This is a system that will allow you to play, and run the football with what we call power, where we're going to come downhill at you. We're going to attack the flanks. We're just going to run the football at you, then we're going to play-action, and strike from anywhere on the field.”

Here’s what Tom Walsh said: “Basically, we’re running the Raider offense the way it’s been run when you go back to the 60s, 70s and the 80s.”

Any questions?

In other words, personnel and chemistry were not perceived as issues. All we needed were Attitude, System and Old School Raiders Football. Working off of that prideful premise, we made little effort to hire a coach from the outside. We hired an insider who hadn’t prowled a sideline in six years, and who hadn’t been a head coach since 1994. We hired an offensive coordinator who had been away from the NFL for more than a decade, and who had been away from the game of football for seven years. We hired a pair of offensive line coaches who, despite once being great players, had marginal coaching experience. We hired a quarterbacks coach with no NFL experience, and very little experience as a quarterbacks coach at any level.

Meanwhile, we made no significant personnel moves on offense. Please don’t say that this was a rebuilding year. Around whom did we allegedly rebuild on offense? Aaron Brooks? Who else? Silence.

Our offensive unit didn’t field itself. Our executives—Al Davis, Mike Lombardi and Art Shell—fielded it. Our executives passed on potential franchise quarterbacks such as Matt Leinart and Jay Cutler in the draft. Our executives passed on a running back like Maurice Jones-Drew in the second round, and did not shore up the running back position via free agency or trading (despite LaMont Jordan’s shortcomings and Justin Fargas’s proneness to injury). Our executives built a receiving corps around two players, Randy Moss and Jerry Porter, with serious character flaws. Our executives put our tight ends position in the hands of two major underachievers. Our executives did not aggressively pursue a free agent lineman such as Larry Allen. They simply signed Aaron Brooks and drafted Paul McQuistan in the third round and Kevin Boothe in the sixth round, and left it at that. Thus, we now find ourselves with huge question marks at quarterback, running back, wide receiver, tight end and offensive line—a totality of uncertainty that is simply stunning.

None of this mattered last summer, however, as long as we had Attitude, System and Old School Raiders Football. Or so we thought. This was the temptation of Al Davis. This was pride blinding reality.

As for me, I was on board. Go read my posts from last summer, you’ll see no shortage of bullish optimism. I’m not going to beat myself up for not being a better talent evaluator than Al Davis, Mike Lombardi and Art Shell. But I bought this season on a conceptual and philosophical level as well. Back in March, I wrote: “Talk about guts. The Oakland Raiders, implored by so many to subscribe to NFL groupthink and to ‘get with the times,’ have instead blazed a spectacular trail back to the future. They may fail. I hope and expect that they will succeed. Either way, they’ll do it on their own terms.”

I was wrong about the outcome, but right about the terms.

If all of this sounds like I’m simply bashing Al Davis after the fact, that I’m saying his pride was unfounded, that it was all one big mistake, then I haven’t made myself clear. I’m not saying those things. I am just saying that the team got ahead of itself and overlooked some crucial matters. We tried to build a beautiful new house, but we built it on sand: talent problems, chemistry issues and coaching inexperience. The house might yet be built, the architectural plans might still be solid, but only if we work a lot harder on building our foundation.

Here’s what we now know for sure: Our current cast of offensive players and coaches, at least together, cannot score touchdowns or win games. That’s an established fact. So before we get ahead of ourselves again, before we start cutting players, devising draft scenarios and deciding whether or not Coach Shell should stay or go, let’s revisit the premise that got us here in the first place. Is the premise itself totally flawed—Art Shell and company leading a return to glory through classic Raiders football—or can this premise work if, unlike last year, we make substantive improvements in our offensive player (and coaching) personnel? Personally, I haven’t decided yet. I still love the premise. The challenge is living up to it.

In closing, I want to address three frequent statements that have the potential to disrupt our logic as we move forward with discussions about where we go from here:

1. It’s all the players’ fault.

So you say it was the players, not the coaches or management, who failed to execute, who literally dropped the ball? Fine. But players don’t sign themselves. Players don’t draft themselves. Players don’t promote or demote themselves. Executives do (in this case, that means Davis, Lombardi and Shell). In what company or organization or sports franchise does the management bear no responsibility when the frontline employees fail to execute their basic job requirements? Who hired these employees? Who trained these employees? Who evaluated these employees and found them capable? Who put the company in the hands of these employees? Sure, Bill Belichik is just lucky and Starbucks is a fluke. To suggest that the players alone are accountable for this mess is to misunderstand the basic concepts of management, organization, training, teambuilding and coaching.

Yes, players are to blame for their own individual lack of execution. Executives, however, are to blame for putting the team in the hands of players who can’t execute.

2. Art Shell is the only one who would take the Raiders coaching job.

After firing Norv Turner, Mr. Davis did not act swiftly. Nor did he make winning pitches to (or accept pitches from) Mike Martz, Ken Whisenhunt, Al Saunders, Bobby Petrino, Cam Cameron, Pat Hill and other coaching candidates. Our search for a head coach was halfhearted at best. Coaches like Sean Payton and Eric Mangini were locked up before we even got out of the gates, and for whatever reason, guys like Whisenhunt and Martz either passed on the job because they weren’t offered enough, or they were not offered the job. Art Shell wasn’t a last resort. He was a choice.

I don’t want to hear that no one wants the Raiders job, period, as if money and assurances have nothing to do with it. Is the OC job in Detroit so much more attractive than leading the Oakland Raiders (Martz)? Is working as an OC for Daniel “Money for Nothing” Snyder the ultimate dream job (Saunders)? Of course not—unless you’re getting better money and/or better assurances. Give the coaching position the equivalent of Jerry Porter’s signing bonus and the right assurances regarding power and responsibilities, and you will have more than enough qualified applicants.

3. Every team eventually goes through this, it’s the cyclical nature of the NFL, it was just our turn.

No, every team does not go through this. Every team does not regress to two wins after consecutive seasons of four, five and four wins. Every team does not score twelve total offensive touchdowns in a season. In today’s parity-driven NFL, it is difficult to stay on top for long. The inverse, however, is also true: it is difficult to stay at the bottom for long. There is no excuse for regressing after three seasons in which you did not exceed five wins. Al Davis will tell you that. It takes a lot of bad decisions for that to happen in today’s NFL. We need to stop making bad decisions. Our margin for error is very slim at this point.

Finally, please remember this: While I say that pride was our undoing in 2006, that doesn’t mean that I think that pride is fundamentally a bad thing. I still have my pride as a Raiders fan, just as the Raiders still have their pride as an organization. With some shrewd moves on offense, we can—no, we will—turn this ship around. I’m on board. Win or die trying. Onward!