Is Lance Kiffin a Bernard Petrino?

Good Morning. Being a Raiders fan has always been a little stupid, especially to fans of other teams who just don't understand the passion that the Raiders generate among those of us who are faithful.

From Jason Jones' excellent blog at the Sacramento Bee, there's this:

And now players have begun calling Davis to express their displeasure with Kiffin.

As word has gotten out that Kiffin pursued jobs at Arkansas and Michigan, the players must feel like they've got a Bobby Petrino among them.

Stay tuned.

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We will definitely stay tuned. On another note, I may have to apologize to Nancy Gay. I haven't decided for sure, yet, but she may very well be saying "I told you so" after this is all over.

The Week Ahead

It should be an exciting one.

Every Raiders offseason brings drama, but it seems to bring more terrible drama each time. Trading Gruden, signing Sapp, signing Moss, hiring Shell, starting from rock bottom with Kiffin. The current disaster is devastating because we thought we had made progress (yes, to 4-12), only to find the trajectory appears still to be downward.

Nothing has actually happened, so no need to panic, right? Unfortunately, the denials on both sides have been weak, to say the least. Kiffin "hopes" he'll be back. Trask proves that she is a lawyer: "He has all the authority he had when he was hired." Sounds more like protection against a breach-of-contract complaint.

The strongest denial thus far is reported by The Chronicle, with Herrera saying, "The whole story is a flat-out lie and a total fabrication. We deny the entire story. No authority has been stripped. That's unabashedly false." But Herrera also admits that Al Davis was irritated by the reports linking Kiffin to Arkansas. Maybe this denial hinges on how you define "story."

Meanwhile, the Raiders have James Lofton in to interview...for something. Coaching changes are underway with a special teams assistant out. And Steve Corkran reports that the Raiders are trying to talk to Al Saunders. Are we to guess that Kiffin wants to replace Knapp?

The one positive I thought we had taken out of 2006 was that Al Davis had a chance to run his offense just the way he wanted to, and it failed so miserably that perhaps he was ready to go in a different direction. Maybe by allowing Arkansas rumors to fester, Kiffin lost his chance for it to be in his direction. As Al Davis proves a more and more impossible boss, taking this franchise in any direction but down will be up to the most desperate of coaching candidates.

As of today, those odds don't look good.

Kiff Vs. Ryan: Credit Where it's Due

While I first read it here on Jason Jones' blog, he points out that David White got the scoop. So here's a link to White's Silver&Black blog at SFGate, which we here at CLOAK OF IMMORTALITY call the "SFGate Hater Blog." I've also questioned his committment in the past, comparing him negatively with Jerry McDonald.

But then here comes Jones with a recap of Adam Schefter's "Kiffin Wants Out" story.

A point on Jones: His blog is excellent. As Jerry winds down after the season ended, Jones comes out with a near-daily question/answer column. It's great stuff.

Good Job, Fellas.

More Wisconsin Insights

Haven't yet been able to reach Mitch at Lambeau, but Rusty is accounted for so it's unlikely that he's busy scraping up bail money. Maybe his phone has frozen in the zero-degree weather.

Rusty did check in from the comfort of his Milwaukee - sorry, Whitefish Bay - home. His key? "Packer WRs and their yards-after-catch against the Giants' banged up secondary. I predict that Driver will finally get a TD, and it's going to be over by the end of the 3rd quarter. Oh yeah - and the 12th man!"

Webster is also remaining consistent with his take from last week. "The Packers need to limit turnovers and they'll win. The cold won't be any advantage - they are just better. Of course the running game will be key."

Mikey expects another blowout. "A 'Giant' fumble will seal the victory for the Packers."

I caught Naves by surprise at the grocery store. Apparently he's been distracted after learning the sex of his second child this week and did not prepare for my call. "Hmm. I think Favre's big right paw without a glove will be the key. If the temp drops below zero, it's the Packers' game to lose." Perhaps now that Chad lives in the deep south, he is most inclined to call weather a major Packer advantage.

Haen is going more low key watching from his home in Ann Arbor after his Packer party started off with two Green Bay turnovers last week. "Turnovers scare me. The weather is going to be a great equalizer. Favre has to take care of the ball and limit the fastballs that could go through receivers' hands."

Jeremy has kicked off his waaaay East Bay Packer party with some Johnsonville Brats and MGD. "The only way the Packers will lose is if Brett has one of those rare disaster games he is capable of having."

From Oshkosh, Vogel understandably says he's not happy with the weather. "If anything, I think it helps the Giants. The stats on the Packers in the cold weather are misleading. But they are the better team, so they should be able to win."

Finally, Meyer checks in to suggest the following for the Packers to cruise to victory: "Steal the Giants' heaters and get an early score!"

The first Packer possession seems to back up most Wisconsinites' assertion that the weather won't help. Favre isn't quite on target and the Giants will take over inside their own 20. This is the third coldest game in NFL history.

Go Pack Go!

Dan's Championship Picks

As long as we are quoting our wives, here's a gem from Kristy about 2 minutes ago as I wrapped up dinner: "Why don't you go blog, and I'll clean up the kitchen." No sarcasm whatsoever. Awesome.

"Poop stuck to the roof of my mouth" is the perfect analogy for tomorrow's early game. Could there be two more unlikable quarterbacks squaring off than Rivers and Brady? A Southern-cocky blowhard vs. a smug perfectionist prick. The game also features the two highest profile active players to drag the NFL into the performance enhancing drug mess in Harrison and Merriman. For a Raiders fan, watching Restraining Order Randy and the Tuckers take on Turner adds an element of pain. And I haven't even gotten to the cheating scandal. At least there is drama. I have always found LaDainian Tomlinson unobjectionable, even while pulling run-catch-pass TD trifectas twice a year against the Raiders. Last year's Marty meltdown made L(D)T even more interesting as he basically compared Belichick to school in the summertime. I love it. The Patriots' squeaky clean Bob Kraft image is the biggest joke in sports.

But the Patriots will win. It is going to be an interesting, physical, and ultimately maddening game. In addition to the fact that they are the team best suited to carry a nation's hatred of the Patriots on their backs, the one thing I like about the Chargers' chances is that they should be able to get to Brady. But a hobbled Rivers-to-Gates-based offense will slip up more often than the Patriots will be stopped. I like the 27-20 call, but for originality I am going to say it ends 30-21, and as the Patriots line up for the game-sealing FG, Tomlinson's head will explode along with 100,000 other Americans who can't handle another week's combination of Brady screaming ridiculous pep talks to his teammates and then smirking away the final 3 minutes of the game. For all the Montana comparisons, could you ever in a million years imagine Brady stepping into the huddle needing an epic drive to win the Super Bowl and cracking, "Hey - there's John Candy."

As for the late game, I am sure that Unk answered the above question about unlikable quarterbacks with a shout of, "Eli!" as he read it. But Eli is a Seinfeld fan, and that makes him ok in my book. Plus, the Chargers were a franchise uninterested in winning when Eli came out, which is probably why very few of the Raider fans I know hate them the way they hate the Chefs and Donkeys.

I grew up in Wisconsin. I'm biased. But Favre is unquestionably a likable quarterback. The guy has fun. He loves the game. He loves his teammates. And he's going to take the Packers to the Super Bowl this year. As I write this the temperature in Green Bay is -7. Tomorrow's TV-friendly evening kickoff might pass the 1993 Raiders game that I attended for the 2nd coldest game ever played at Lambeau Field. Unless the 13-mph wind forecast is a drastic underestimate, Favre will operate well with a heavy dose of Ryan Grant to back him.

Tomorrow I'll add as much Wisconsin insight as I can gather, but from my viewpoint the Packers will win 31-20 for the following reasons. The Giants have hobbled (Burress) or old (Toomer) WRs, and Shockey is gone. Woodson and Harris can man up, leaving Bigby free to cheat up and slow down the running game. If Bigby has even half the game he had against Seattle, the defense will be stout. Gotta love a guy named "Atari." To score on New York means limiting the pass rush. No team has a better quick-hitting pass game than the Packers, and with Grant's emergence and a diverse screen game, the Packers should be able to game plan for that. Look at what they did last week against Kerney and company.

If my picks are right, this could set up a personal disaster on par with Super Bowls XXXII and XXXVII when teams I absolutely hated (Broncos and Bucs) beat teams I love (Packers and Raiders). Oh yeah, I'll be on a plane.

Is Bill Simmons a Jinx; John's Picks

The other day after Bill Simmons wrote the column asking which was Boston's best ever team, the 1986 Celtics or the 2007 Patriots, I said he was "jinxing the hell out of them."
I know Dan isn't a fan of Simmons' work, we've talked about this and he said as much in the comments of that post, implying that he is part of ESPN's Bristol, CT-based East Coast Bias.

It's actually a little more complicated than that. See, ever since espn.com debuted Page 2 in November, 2000, I don't think I've missed a column by the guy who was then known as "The Boston Sports Guy." Back then, there were three writers I absolutely had to read every week that wrote for Page 2: Hunter S. Thompson, Ralph Wiley, and Bill Simmons. Hunter and Ralph both passed away, and now it's just Bill Simmons that I still read every week.

The thing is, there are two Bill Simmonses. There's the "Sports Guy," who has great composition skills, understands the intersection of sports and pop culture and navigates that intersection better than anyone. He's a populist writer who regularly features a "mailbag" column in which he prints his funniest readers' comments and questions and responds to them, and the feel is like a group of friends hanging around talking about sports, movies, and TV shows. One of the signs of a great writer is that he or she gives you a feeling of intimacy when you're reading them, so that even though you've never met that person, you feel like you're buddies. Bill Simmons is that kind of writer.

Here's an example of how that works for me. In 2002, I got married and moved from Los Angeles, where I was living at the time, to Connecticut, where the Professor was immersed in her graduate studies at Yale. Around that same time, Bill Simmons married the Sports Gal and moved from Boston to Los Angeles. His columns made a lot more sense to me now, since I had driven on Merritt Parkway, and I now knew who Mike and the Mad Dog were. Then we both had daughters within 4 or 5 months of each other. So even though I've never met Bill Simmons, I feel like I know him because of the shared experience as sports fans and fathers, all transmitted through his columns. This Bill Simmons is one of the reasons I wanted to have a Raiders blog.

The other Bill Simmons is the "Boston Sports Guy," and this guy is an insecure, boring, otherwise-regional hack. He carried the collective angst of New England's sports fans to a world that was otherwise able to ignore it. This is where his love of TV and pop culture comes in. Sure, everyone knows about Ken Burns and his 17-hour exegesis of the 1986 World Series Game Six Collapse, where all of Boston's literary icons pompously left the R's out of words describing their heartbreak. But to the average sports fan who doesn't watch PBS or listen to NPR, here came Bill Simmons writing about "The World's Strongest Man" and "The Real World." The teams from his hometown were losers: it had been 14 years (in 2000) since the Celtics had won a championship, seemingly cursed with the deaths of Len Bias and Reggie Williams, and Rick Pitino trying to murder the franchise; the Curse of the Bambino was in full effect; the Patriots were losers who had never won anything.

Then, a couple of things happened. Walt Coleman created a Patriots Dynasty. The Red Sox came back from a 4-0 deficit to beat the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS and went on to win their first World Series since 1918. And now the Celtics got Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen and have the best record in the NBA. It's quite conceivable that Boston could have all three major sports championships, which would be not only impressive but downright fucking irritating to the rest of the country. With all of this success, Simmons' Boston columns went from being anxious rants to obnoxious, gloating rants. And I don't blame him, I just don't enjoy reading them.

The 86 Celtics vs. 2007 Pats is the perfect example of this new, arrogant Boston Sports Guy. First of all, nobody outside of New England remembers anything about that 1986 Celtics team, except maybe that Len Bias died, and because of him black kids get sent to jail for longer terms over crack than white businessmen get sent to jail for having the same amount of cocaine powder. He writes that the defending champion Lakers team allowed themselves to be be "'shocked' by the upstart Rockets -- with Sampson making the series-winning shot in Game 5 at Los Angeles -- to avoid what would have been a ritual beating by an unstoppable Celtics team." This is a bunch of crap. That Lakers team would rebound the following and beat the Celtics, and then repeat in 1988 for the first back-to-back NBA Championship in 20 years. Sure, people remember the 80s as the golden age of the NBA, and Lakers vs. Celtics was the main reason. But outside of New England, only racist white people rooted for the Celtics. And no matter what anyone from Boston tells you, that is the absolute truth. One summer in 1988, my friends and I were playing ball down at the local school yard. We were like 13 or 14 and there was this older man, probably in his mid-forties, and his son, who was 19 or twenty. We played with them because we need two to make it four on four, enough for a full court game on the short courts. When the older guy asked what team we were, I said the Lakers, and he said, "The Lakers are a bunch of Niggers. You want to root for white people. Be the Celtics." His son was kinda embarrassed, I think, because when we were talking later he said, "I like McHale, but I bet you'd rather be Worthy..."

Besides, it was Magic who joined Joe Montana and Wayne Gretzky on the cover of Sports Illustrated under the headline "They Dominated the Eighties."

Now, this Patriots is dominant. And they're probably good enough not be beyond Jinxing by Bill Simmons' column. But if you were going to write a column comparing a dominant team in one sport to a dominant team in another, wouldn't it be the 1996 Bulls team that won 70 games and had All Stars up and down the roster? Brady and Moss compare better to MJ and Scottie Pippen, with Rodney Harrisons' Punk Ass analogous to Dennis Rodman's Punk Ass. I'm just saying.

Anyway, in what is either a blatant ripoff of one of my favorite writers, or, if you're generous, an homage to someone I admire, here's an email I got from the Professor the other day that will segue into my picks:

Subject: Your Daughter and Your Dog are Disgusting

Lily pooped in her panties, which I noticed after she came into the kitchen and told me "poop!" She had a big old saggy load. I pulled off her panties right there in the kitchen and the turd log fell out onto the floor in front of the fridge. I took her into the bathroom to wipe and wash hands. In the meantime, Iggy smelled a tasty treat and hopped out of bed to go have himself a snack. By the time I turned around, he'd eaten half of Lily's turd. I yelled at him to quit it and he ran away, but it was like he had peanut butter stuck to the roof of his mouth that he kept trying to swallow but couldn't. He's outside now, washing his mouth out with soap. Fucking disgusting.

I'm running away from home today. You can raise these two yourself.

I should point out that we're potty training, which is why Baby Lily was not wearing a diaper. But the reason this email is relevant is because having to choose between the Patriots and the Chargers is akin to having poop stuck to the roof of my mouth like peanut butter. I can't think of two teams I hate more (I hate Denver and Kansas City as much). Anyway, I think New England wins but it's closer than everyone expects. 27-20.

Green Bay wins. I have to go. This has gone on too long and people are becoming exasperated with me.

The Hall

Tuesday was another bad day for this Raider fan. It was then that the NFL announced that Lester Hayes did not make the cut from semifinalist to finalist for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Despite Jeffri Chadiha recently declaring Lester's 1980 season the ninth best individual season in NFL history, Lester was again snubbed. Why? Maybe voters actually believe that he would have been a "mere mortal" without Stickum. Perhaps the fact that he overcame stuttering by speaking like a crazy backwoods preacher has them worried about sending him to the podium. Or it could be punishment for the fact that Lester once pawned his Super Bowl ring in Reno for some "emergency dental work." Hey, he had a spare anyway.

Making matters worse, the list of finalists who knocked Lester aside include some real insults. Paul Tagliabue when he has barely had time to shred the evidence of his disdain for the Raiders strewn about his office? Yuck. Triple-C, Chris Crybaby Carter? Horrible irony to see a guy who made his career out of complaining for 10 minutes every time a cornerback covered him knock the greatest CB ever out of contention for the HoF. Art Monk - legit, but head-to-head Lester shut him down long after Stickum had been banned to try and limit Lester's dominance. There are even two Broncos on the list. Broncos don't belong in the Hall of Fame.

The good news is that Ray Guy is a finalist. I really think he deserves it. A real highlight of my week was watching the one reason to turn the channel away from NFL Network, Jamie Dukes, give the standard meathead reply when asked if Ray Guy should get in. "A punter? Are you kidding me?" Jamie Dukes commenting on the Hall of Fame? Are you kidding me? Ray Guy dominated at his position, and last I checked, Punter is a spot on the player roster. In fact, the sport is called FOOT-BALL, and he's one of only two individuals on the roster who actually connects the two syllables of the sport's name.

Well, taking a cue from my NFL idol Lester Hayes, I'm going to learn the complete destiny of forgiveness. I'll keep wearing my #37 jersey to every Raiders game. And meanwhile, I'm going to enjoy the very good fortune I had this boat racing season that got me into the American Power Boat Association's Hall of Champions. On February 2 I will realize a life-long dream and be inducted in Detroit, which is the same day that a bunch of non-Lester Hayes jokers will be elected to the Pro Football HoF.

It also means I'll be on a plane during the Super Bowl. But I think I can live with that.