Raiders Pick Big Guys and Big-Play Guys

When the Raiders cut loose receiver Malcolm Barnwell this summer with the appropriate sad faces and sighs of regret about how he was a casualty of this year’s 45-man roster rule, one rival front-office type was unconvinced. “Oh, oh, this means Dokie Williams is better than we feared,” he said.

The prevailing opinion about the Raiders is that they have the same recruitment procedures as the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. They get their man the same way the FBI, Texas Rangers, Scotland Yard or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police do. They follow a trail of screams. They check post office walls, jail-break records.

But this leads to a misconception of Raider philosophy. The Raiders’ secret is not that they bludgeon you to death. It’s not the organized mayhem, not intimidation, not systematic strong-arming that wears down opponents.

The Raiders beat you because they can strike from any place on the field. Without warning. The Raiders are not a ball-control team. The Raiders don’t need the ball much on their good days.

The Raider plan is to stretch the defense. With the Raiders, you have your backs to the wall when they’re on their own 10-yard line. When you play the Raiders, you watch the horizon. Some teams would almost rather have the Raiders inside their 20. That way, you can keep an eye on them.

“We don’t take what the defense gives us,” their leader, Al Davis, has warned. “We take what we want.”

The Raiders have the swiftest strike force since the Confederate cavalry. Along with the muscle, they draft for anti-violence. They need a lot of guys who like to hit. But they need key ones who would do anything to avoid it.

It’s where they get them that makes the league gnash its teeth. They get blue-chippers in the caboose of the draft regularly. They’ve done it again with Dokie Williams.

No one will be able to figure out one day why Darryl (Dokie) Williams was still hanging around in the fifth round in the 1983 NFL draft. What will be even more mystifying is why he never started a game in his five years at UCLA. Why he only played on special teams, even in the Rose Bowl.

There are two kinds of receivers in pro football--those who catch lots of balls, and those who catch a select few. A Super Bowl team needs one of each. One guy keeps the linebackers home. The other guy keeps the safety men in a state of near cardiac arrest.

What the Raiders liked about Dokie Williams was that he caught eight passes in his senior year at UCLA--and four of them were for touchdowns. In his career at UCLA, he caught 16 passes and five of them were for touchdowns.

The Raider scouts have always had a sure instinct for big-play guys. The report on Dokie Williams was: “If you got the ball to him, he caught it. If he caught it, it was ‘See ya later!’ ”

The reason Dokie Williams wasn’t playing more in college was another plus in the Raiders’ view. He was a track star--long jump and triple jump--and college coaches don’t like track stars. They miss spring practice. The Raiders like track stars. The Raiders found Cliff Branch lolling around in the fourth round of the draft in 1972 and he had been Texas state champion in the 100 and 200, the first high school sprinter ever to run 9.3.

Wide-outs, as the pro nomenclature has them, need blinding speed. Their mission is to strike terror into the hearts of cornermen and free safeties. On most plays, their role is to attract double-coverage or better. Fred Biletnikoff was so good at it in his career with the Raiders that he used to look as if he was leading a parade. On a hot day, his pants and socks a-drip with stickum, he used to look like a melting snowman fleeing crows.

Stickum has been outlawed, but Dokie Williams doesn’t need it. He has what the league calls soft hands, as opposed to the clang given off by the steel-fingered pass catching set.

There are elements of a heist in what the wide receivers do. On Sunday, with the ball on the New York Jets’ 31-yard line, after Williams caught a 33-yard pass to put it there, Raider quarterback Jim Plunkett sent his tight end, Todd Christensen, on a post pattern (veering toward the goal posts on his run).

As Christensen cut away, Dokie Williams appeared to relax. Behind him, Plunkett cocked, aimed--and appeared about to release the ball to Christensen. The defender took the bait. He suddenly scrambled away from Dokie Williams, cut frantically towards Christensen.

“I had gone into idle,” Williams said.

Left alone, he went into high. He streaked into the end zone, where the ball was waiting for him. He caught five passes Sunday, but that was the game breaker.

Some day, the 1980s Raiders are going to drive archivists mad. In trying to reconstruct their characteristics, they will interview guys who played offense against the Raiders who will tell them: “The Raiders? A whole bunch of guys 7 feet tall, 290 pounds with blood dripping from their fangs, twisting ball-carriers into knots and trying to stuff them in their pants to eat later.”

But the defense will say: “The Raiders? Oh, a whole bunch of these dainty little characters who disappear on you or pretend they’re just out for a jog and then all of a sudden they pull a football out of your ear.”

Whatever their dimensions, they usually come wearing this big glittering ring that says Super Bowl on the side.