Before beginning this thing a little background on this upcoming season needs to be established. So here you go.
When Al Davis slid into oblivion in early October of 2011, Raider fans around the world expressed grief and sadness over the loss of one of America's greatest football legends. But like the death of a rich, burdensome relative, many of us high-fived each other behind closed doors. Within weeks (hell, hours) we were rubbing our hands together at the prospect of the team being yanked out of 1985 and into the present day by a savior, a general manager. To many Raider fans, Al is a sacred cow and that's fine; he's out to pasture now. But the reality is that we needed someone who could turn this creaking shithouse of an NFL organization around so that some day we would no longer have to play Charmin to the rest of the league's bathroom breaks.
Mark Davis is the son of Al Davis and now owns most of the team. He's a man with a comic book haircut and more sense than his dad had at the end of his years. That's why he hired Reggie McKenzie to GM the team after Al left to file lawsuits against football leagues in the the afterlife.
At the time, McKenzie was hailed as the best man for the job after all his years and experience with the Packers. I happen to agree with that. Since coming to the team McKenzie has begun to modernize the franchise, make reasonable personnel decisions and dragged the franchise by its horrible haircut through an ocean of dead cap money. As of now the Raiders organization is paying tens of millions of dollars to players who aren't even on the team anymore. But it's what needed to be done. If you're friends with someone who says otherwise, stop being friends with them. They're dangerously moronic and their stupidity could stain your clothes.
That's not to say that McKenzie hasn't made his share of blunders. The firing of Hue Jackson and subsequent hiring of Dennis Allen is likely one of the worst mistakes the Raiders new GM could have made. If nothing else than for stability's sake, Jackson should have been retained through the 2013 season. The team had a solid offense and excellent special teams. It's big problem was its defense, a system so antiquated it's taught to high school JV teams. Of course most of the players sucked and many were overpaid: Richard Seymour, Stanford Routt, and Kamerion Wimbley immediately come to mind. On their salaries alone every starving kid in Somalia could have begun competing with American children for skyrocketing cases of Type II Diabetes. At any rate, what's done is done. McKenzie hired Dennis Allen to much fanfare, gave him a NDL size contract and the power to hire anyone he wanted. And jeez Louise did Dennis Allen go on a hiring binge.
Seemingly unaware of the skill sets of the players on his roster, Allen hired Greg Knapp, a man who'd managed to get fired from three offensive coordinator positions before he came aboard last season. It's worth mentioning that one of the offensive coordinator positions he'd been given the boot from before last season was the Oakland Raiders. Yep. Halfway through his second season the offensive guru, Tom Cable, had to take play-calling duties away from Knapp; and it wasn't because the offense was scoring too many points. Predictably enough, when Knapp re-assumed his duties in Oakland last year a dynamic offense full of players built around speed, vertical passing, and power running was transformed into a quivering dung heap masquerading as a west coast offense.
As for special teams, Dennis Allen let go of John Fassel, a guy who brought life and point scoring to the special teams and replaced him with Some Guy. Some Guy did the same thing to the special teams unit that Knapp did to the offense. Full equality was achieved. Every unit sucked equally.
Defense? We didn't have one before Jason Tarver took the reigns from Al's last defensive coordinator, Chuck Bresnahan, and we didn't have one last year. It was a unit riddled with injuries and lazy-assed millionaires. Like standing in one vat of manure for six hours and then jumping into another vat of manure, things were pretty much the same.
Three Dennis Allen hires, two abject failures and one that couldn't fairly be evaluated except to say he didn't improve anything. Like a cartoon character paralyzed by the piano that's about to fall on him, Dennis Allen could only watch while everything he did crashed down on top of him. He and his staff stubbornly stuck to the stuff they worked on in preseason and dammit, not even losing games by an average of 16 points was going to deter them. To be fair, there was a token attempt to mix in some power run blocking toward the end of the season but the horse had already fled the barn, got hit by a truck, and was being melted down in a glue factory. Dennis Allen's first year as head coach of our Oakland Raiders was a comic/tragic exercise in failure. It took a historically bad team in the Chiefs, a bumbling Steeler team, and the Jags losing their starting running back and quarterback in a ten minute span for Allen's Raiders to win any games at all.
Yet he's still here. There are good reasons for that though. That'll be in the preview-preview. Thanks for reading.
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