Raiders’ Next Coach Will Face Same Old Problem With Boss

Al Davis went Scrooge one better. He fired Bob Cratchit on Christmas Eve.

Which is well and good if it’s dramatic effect you seek. The consensus regarding the Raiders, however, is that meaningful change might better fit their holiday needs.

They won’t get it from Tuesday’s bold stroke. True, Mike White wasn’t the answer. The Raiders didn’t play for him, they apparently didn’t listen to him and they obviously didn’t fear him.

On the other hand, Mike White wasn’t the question, either. He wasn’t what ails that twisted franchise. He just couldn’t fix what does.

Neither could Art Shell, the coach before him. Nor Mike Shanahan, the coach before him. Even Tom Flores, the coach who preceded Shanahan, had a rough final two years. Add it up and you get a team that has made the playoffs just three times in the past 11 seasons.

That suggests something chronic, a problem that isn’t getting solved. While you’re gnawing on that brain teaser, here are a couple more things to consider:

Davis will soon begin a dictatorship-wide search for a new coach. And next year, Big Al is going to become more involved with the day-to-day operation of the team.

Wouldn’t that be like Michael Irvin saying that next year he’s going to learn to loosen up off the field?

The universal perception of the Raiders, which they do little to discourage, is that the team is run by the same 11th-century feudal philosophies that came and went with moats and battering rams.

Davis does it all. He hires the coaches, he drafts the players, he OKs the game plan, he moves the team, he orders the paper clips, he chooses the in-flight movie (“Genghis Khan: Misunderstood Genius” is said to be a personal favorite), he operates the Marcus Allen Memorial Doghouse, he issues the midgame critiques, he chooses the soap for the postgame showers.

White showed his coaching mettle at California and Illinois. He never had a chance with the Raiders, and probably knew better than to expect one. He went 8-8, then 7-9; or, to put it another way, he went 7-15 after opening last season with an 8-2 run.

That’s about right considering what he had to work with. Contrary to the quaint and popular local notion, the Raiders do not have the talent to get to a Super Bowl. They have an outstanding, professional wide receiver in Tim Brown. They have a big-hearted, upper-middle-class quarterback in Jeff Hostetler. They have three functional running backs, whom they underuse. They have an outstanding interior defensive line with Chester McGlockton and Jerry Ball.

Beyond that they have a group of ordinary, common players, and a group of intriguing athletes who will never understand football.

That’s a personnel mishmash, and an inattentive one at that. Whatever grand plans White did manage to devise, they were undone time and again by his team’s stupefying inability to play the game without either forgetting the snap count or biffing an opposing player after the whistle.

Without the authority to discourage that kind of absent-minded hooliganism, White was powerless to stop it. That’s pretty much what you get when you make the players talk to Mortimer Snerd instead of communicating directly with Edgar Bergen.

Davis, incredibly, contends he gave White as much latitude as he has any coach. “We tried to do just about everything different over these last two years,” Raiders executive Bruce Allen said. “Al was willing to walk away and let the coaches run the program, but it didn’t work.”

Say a prayer for the next coach.

Even more incredibly, Allen said that it is Davis’ wish that the Raiders regain the intimidating, aggressive aura of their glory years.

Wouldn’t that be a little like handing the school bully an automatic weapon?

The problem with the Raiders isn’t Mike White, and never was. The problem is the system. Or more accurately, the fact that the Raiders don’t have one.

What they have is a one-man board of directors that lost its grasp of the game 10 years ago. Which is fine if your goal in life is to run a football team the way you want while reserving the right to thumb your nose at the rest of the world.

The consensus around the rest of the NFL, however, is that winning is even more fun. Good luck telling that to Scrooge. He’s still riding the high of firing Bob Cratchit on Christmas eve.