Growth?

Kawakami has an excellent column this morning, asking if Al and the Raiders will learn from this mistake.

It's important to remember that Lance Kiffin wasn't exactly qualified for this position when he got it. Everybody else, from Bernard Petrino to Mike Martz to Dan and I were interviewed for this job, and while not all of us were offered the job, we all took ourselves out of the running for various reasons. But once Lane got here, I thought he did a pretty good job of trying to change the culture of the locker room. And according to Steve Corkran on KNBR the other day, all of this started when Lane fired Rob Ryan in January. Ryan went upstairs to say "Peace Out" to Al, and Al said, "Let's not start sucking each other's dicks just quite yet, Lance doesn't have hiring and firing power." (These are not verbatim quotes. Listen to the podcast.) Al wrote up a letter of resignation, said "Sign it, you little punk." "Fire me."

Anyway, at this point, Lane has to go. He just has to be fired. The Raiders, instead of acting like a merely incompetent organization and just firing their coach, are passing around notes saying their coach is a bad kid. This is ridiculous. I don't even remember the Bengals doing shit like this. The Clippers never acted this way. The closest thing I can think of is the maybe the way Steinbrenner treated Dave Winfield by paying a mafia gambler for dirt on him. But he was a player.

Getting back to Kawakami's column, I think the answer to the question "Will Al/Raiders learn anything?" is no. Sadly, depressingly, hilariously, no.