The Oakland Raiders have reached 3 AAD (three years after Al Davis). And there’s a perverse sickness ravaging Oakland. Raiders fans have no immunity to it — they haven’t seen it in ages.
Optimism is ravaging Oakland.
The Raiders are making sensical decisions, and the team is improving. Soak it in — just for a moment.
With all due respect to Al Davis, his departure from the franchise has been the best thing for it… may he rest in peace. This isn’t to say that his passing wasn’t a tragedy — it was tragic. This isn’t to say that he wasn’t a phenomenal general manager — for some time, he was. But the man’s legacy was built upon winning three championships between 1976 and 1983. His reign needed to end, probably after he lost the Super Bowl in 2002 to Jon Gruden, the coach Davis fired the year prior.
Am I an asshole for ripping on a dead guy? Probably. But I’m a candid asshole — with a good point.
The Raiders first-round selection of Amari Cooper was a prime example of where the franchise has deviated from the Davis days. Cooper is a refined prospect that will make Derek Carr better immediately. At 6-foot-1, Cooper can jump 34 inches and run a 4.42 40-yard dash. More importantly, he can run every route, and every game at Alabama was an exhibition of a wideout being wide-fucking-open.
The 2015 NFL Draft had a foil to Cooper in Kevin White. Where Cooper was savvy, White was raw. While Cooper was demonstrating a high ceiling for three years in college, White flashed the ability to have even greater potential. They weren’t perfect opposites, but were attractive for wildly different reasons.
White is 6-3. He runs a 4.35 40. And he can jump 36.5 inches. In a game of centimeters, White is physically able to cover more distance and height than Cooper. Yet the Raiders picked Cooper. Davis probably tossed and turned in his grave — White was his kind of guy. He was the Bruce Campbell of wide receivers. Still, Cooper was the right pick to make. The tiny shortcomings of Cooper physically — which are only shortcomings when compared to a freak like White — are massively outweighed by production.
An argument could be made that the true anti-Davis pick would be to take Leonard Williams. But Cooper is more of a sure-thing than any of the prospects in this draft class. And as elite wide receivers grow more expensive, the Raiders got one for a discount in Cooper.
The scouting department probably said a prayer for Davis in 2012 right before they threw away his rule-book for evaluating prospects. There were probably a few hidden fist pumps — moments of sweet relief. And then, Reggie McKenzie passed around the new literature, which has produced two-consecutive drafts that has yielded this epidemic of optimism in Oakland.
There are leftovers. Latavius Murray, an athletic freak that Al Davis would have loved, went in the sixth-round to the Raiders in 2013 NFL Draft. He had a solid second season, and scrambled for a pair of touchdowns and 112 yards on four carries against the Chiefs. The Raiders responded by giving him the ball 23 times the following week — and he managed only 76 yards. So the guy’s got some consistency to iron out, and perhaps he’s not a four-down back. But it seems that they’ve found a late-round prospect that’s incredibly athletic and talented. The difference is that they found him in the sixth round… not the first.
The only first-round picks currently on the roster that Al Davis selected since 1998 are Sebastian Janikowski and Charles Woodson. In fact, seven of them aren’t on rosters anywhere. Davis’ first round picks weren’t all bust. He deserves credit on players like Nnamdi Asomugha and Robert Gallery.
But come on. Rolando McClain was a good player, whose talent Davis couldn’t corral. Darren McFadden was a bad pick, mostly because running backs shouldn’t go in the Top 10, let alone the Top 5 (the Rams didn’t get the memo this year). I imagine Raiders fans felt that watching Darrius Heyward-Bey was a lot like watching The Red Wedding — again and again on every single play. And JaMarcus Russell… well, you know. He’s one of the worst busts ever. Maybe the worst.
Davis had a habit of misevaluating prospects in all rounds, particularly the first. And it wasn’t like Bill Belichick, who probably needs to take a viagra before he gets the courage to draft a wide receiver. Nor was it like Pete Carroll, who just trades out of the first-round because he’s better at drafting in the third- and fifth-rounds. Davis couldn’t recognize that he couldn’t draft any position effectively — offensive linemen especially. And as it turns out, those fat guys are pretty important — ask Tony Romo and the rest of the Cowboys.
So the Raiders have moved on from Davis. It’s sad that his departure from the franchise also meant his departure from this world, because life and death are a hell of a lot more important than football. But his passing liberated the Raiders from his faulty thinking. The Raiders could be a good football team as soon as next year, and it’s thanks to a full-on revamp from current GM McKenzie.
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