It's been hard to ignore the Lane Kiffen/Al Davis drama.  My brother-in-law wanted Kiffen to get fired just so he wouldn't have to hear about it anymore.  Fair enough.  As a Raiders fan, I've been putting a great deal of thought into the matter and have been in Kiffen's corner pretty much the entire time.  Kiffen had the Raiders players playing to the best of their abilities and the team is clearly better than when he first took over.  We actually move the football and don't get sacked every other play.  Not only that, the players respond to Kiffen.  They play hard and, outside of the Broncos game, have been competitive, which is a far cry from last year and the year before that.  In fact, the Raiders could easily be 3-1 with the collapses against Buffalo and San Diego being two games that the Raiders easily could have and probably should have won.  Interestingly enough, those types of collapses are almost always blamed on bad coaching, but Kiffen has managed to dodge any such criticism, but we'll get to Kiffen's effect on the media later.  What's most important is that it's clear Kiffen was in an impossible situation and that Al Davis is the real problem here.  Lane Kiffen was brought in to win, not to improve a hapless team.  He was allowed next to no control and was told to keep his mouth shut.  That doesn't sound too fair and there was no way that he was going to come out on top.  I'm not too worried about Kiffen because he's sure to be either a head college coach or offensive coordinator in the NFL next year.

The Raiders have been awful for the past several years because of Al Davis.  He exerts total control over the franchise so it's not a reach to blame him for everything that has gone on.  I look at him the way I look at some guys on the golf course who are getting older.  These older guys on the golf course are always coming up 15 yards short with their iron shots because they think that they will hit the ball just as far as they did 10, 20, 30 years ago.  I love playing golf with my Grandpa.  He turns 87 in a couple of weeks, still works at a business he owns where there are a couple of hundred people working for him.  He and my Grandma travel to all parts of the world on cruises twice a year for a couple of weeks at a time.  He's a remarkable and brilliant man, but he suffers from the same 15 yards short syndrome when he plays golf, which he still does once or twice a week.  A good friend of mine pointed the syndrome out to me before he passed on.  It's not that his contemporaries were fighting their egos, it's that they couldn't understand why they were coming up short with their irons.  If you hit a five iron 200 yards when you're 25, you expect to do the same when you're 30, so why would there be a dramatic decrease from ages 65 to 70 or 75 to 80, etc.?  That's where Al Davis is.  He's been hitting his five iron 200 yards for so long and can't figure out why it isn't traveling as far now.  In other words, Al Davis has been winning by doing things his way with total control for so many years now, that he just assumes that he'll never fall off.  He has Super Bowl rings to prove that his way works, so with all of this losing in the past few years, he figures it must be the coaches.  It can't be him.  And that's why the Raiders are losing.  Al Davis is getting older and he doesn't know it.  So back to the Lane Kiffen situation.

I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I'm on Al Davis' side in this one.  Everybody is asking who's lying in the situation.  Who cares?  You're never going to be able to prove who's being truthful and, as someone who has seen his fair share of lawsuits, I can tell you that they're both probably lying.  Everybody lies.  I fought a traffic ticket in court and the police officer lied under oath.  So forget about who's telling the truth, though I must say I thought Al Davis made a more compelling case than did Kiffen.  Plus, it's uncanny how many former Raiders come out in complete support of Al Davis even though they have nothing to gain by doing so.  Al Davis really is a players' owner.  However, he looked like a boss who had been waiting to fire an employee and had just been gathering whatever evidence he could find in the past several months so that he could fire the employee for cause and avoid a lawsuit.  But I don't care who made the more compelling case yesterday because this has been brewing for months now.  Al Davis definitely wasn't lying when he said that he wanted to fire Lane Kiffen months ago and now we're all spared the weekly story telling us that Lane Kiffen has been fired.  This was almost as bad as the Brett Favre saga.

Here's why I'm on Al Davis' side when it comes to the Lane Kiffen situation only.  Al Davis was up front about everything.  When Lane Kiffen, and every Raiders coach for that matter, got hired, here's what was made clear:

1.  Al Davis picks the players.  No input will be allowed.
2.  Al Davis picks the rest of the coaching staff.  No input will be allowed.
3.  You, as the coach, are expected to win.  No excuses will be allowed.
4.  Al Davis will be around the players, a lot, and he will give them advice.
5.  If any of the aforementioned are violated, challenged, or disregarded, you will be fired.

Lane Kiffen knew all of this because everybody knows that Al Davis runs things his way.  Kiffen signed on the dotted line and therefore accepted the aforementioned conditions to his employment.  That's not to say that Al Davis is right to run things his way when the Raiders can't beat anyone anymore, but Kiffen accepted the terms and then defied them.  Kiffen tried to influence personnel decisions, be it with the draft or free agents.  Kiffen then tried to get his defensive coordinator fired, a move that there was no excuse for because if Al Davis didn't acquiesce to Kiffen's demand, which Davis wouldn't, Kiffen would still be working with a guy who he tried to get fired.  What kind of atmosphere is that going to create?  When Kiffen realized that Al Davis wasn't going to listen to him, he went to the media and played the role of the victim.  It was a good move.  Everyone knows that Al Davis is off his rocker now and that working for him as a coach cannot be fun.  That's why a lot of people, myself included, probably sided with Kiffen.  But to side with Kiffen would be to ignore the obvious.  Lane Kiffen knew what he was signing up for.  He was not going to get a head coaching job as a 31-year old anywhere else so he weighed the pros and cons and decided that, even with having to deal with Al Davis, it was a good move to take the Raiders head coaching job.  He disobeyed Al Davis' rules, did so publicly, and got fired.  I'm not arguing that he shouldn't get his money because he should get every penny that his contract guaranteed him.  I'm arguing that even though Al Davis is wrong, Lane Kiffen was wrong too to try and change him.  Lane Kiffen lost his job as a result and his trying to act surprised means Kiffen's either acting, or he's living in a similar fairy tale land to the one Davis currently occupies.  It's another bad day as a Raiders fan.