R.I.P. Al Davis 1929-2011

Al Davis, the man you hated to love and loved to hate, is gone. We eased off on the criticism of Al this season, because it was obvious he wasn't long for this world. And, yes, at times we have openly stated that the good people of Raider Nation were just waiting and watching for when Al would pass on and release his increasingly ineffective stranglehold on the team.

But let's not forget what that stranglehold brought. 3 Championships and some of the most fun football to watch ever. And some of the most colorful teams, and some of the dirtiest hardest fighting teams you will ever witness. The Raider glory days are the 60s-70s-80s. My all time favorite NFL season for any team was the 1980 Raiders when Jim Plunkett, the most underdog of underdog quarterbacks at that point in his seemingly failed career, took over at QB in the preseason for the injured Dan Pastorini, and promptly started throwing bomb after bomb down the field, seemingly always for a touchdown, and always leading to victory. They won the 1981 Super Bowl, and just to prove it wasn't some fluke, did it again in '83.

Of course, by that time, 1983, they had moved to LA, and it is needless to say on how many levels that pissed off anyone who lived in the Bay Area (for you outsiders, that's Oakland, San Francisco, Marin, Sonoma, San Jose and anything near SF Bay). At that point, we all hated Al. With a passion. I can't express how deep the resentment went.

Things slowly went downhill after Raiders won that Super Bowl, and even after they returned to Oakland, Al Davis was no longer viewed as the smart maverick who could take any motley crew of cast-offs and mold them into winners. The fans did not fill the stadium, except for a Broncos game, and so the home team was blacked out for the entire season for years. It was like they had never come home. He was viewed as a reclusive, paranoid, litigating, aging crank who was losing his ability to judge talent and who fired his coach every year. That changed when he hired Jon Gruden as coach. Then, as expected, he and Gruden fought. And fought some more. Then Al did the crazy thing. After TRADING Jon Gruden to the Tampa Bay Bucs, a trade absolutely nobody wanted except Al (and Gruden ultimately), the Raiders made it to the 2003 Super Bowl- incredibly against Gruden's Bucs, and got trampled. Humiliated might be the word.

It wasn't pretty. What followed was 8 years of the worst football the Silver and Black have ever witnessed. Nobody was good enough for Al, and almost all of his personnel decisions turned out bad (or seemed to). The poster boy for the deteriorating situation was JaMarcus Russell, the purple drank swilling mega-bust from LSU. The Doormat Division got started because of the Raider's completely disassembled franchise. The Detroit Lions may have been the marquee losers of the era, but actually the Raiders were worse in every aspect of the game.

Amazingly, the Raiders have rebounded out of that absolute pit, and are at least respectable again, and I am glad they did it before Al checked out. Also, a number of his draft picks that people sneered at are suddenly looking pretty good. As ever, they have the fastest team in the league. They have the best running back in the league. Their new coach, Hue Jackson, actually seems like a good coach. Al was at the game last week, a rare sighting lately.

And, of course, now that Al is gone, NOW WHAT? We wanted him to leave, now he's gone. The Raiders have a game today, in Houston. You know what Al would say to them, before hitting the field.

He may have not been his old self anymore, but no one replaces Al Davis. He was one of a kind, and one of the greatest football minds of all time. We're gonna miss him.