ANALYSIS : Raiders’ Rebuilding Year Shakes Foundation : Losing Brings a Silent Rage, but They May Be on Right Track for Future

Over at the Raiders’ El Segundo facility, one-time fun house of the National Football League, the gloom is so thick, a halfback has to be careful he doesn’t drive his Ferrari Testarossa into a safety’s BMW 735i.

Where Ted Hendricks once changed costumes, and Lyle Alzado bared his teeth, and Howie Long raised brashness to an art form, and Lester Hayes forecast Coach Davis’ moods, today there is only a ringing silence.

Hendricks and Alzado are gone. Hayes is as good as gone. Long is doggedly diplomatic.

So much for the good times. How about the bad?

Once, if these guys lost two games in a row, visitors took their lives in their hands, asked questions and checked for flying furniture. The current losing streak is seven games, longest in Al Davis’ tenure as coach or managing general partner, but there is little overt anger shown. Management has made it known that it wants no more public lashing out at the quarterbacks, or the offense, so everyone just shrugs and echoes Coach Tom Flores’ oft-quoted line: “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

They haven’t begun to accept losing, have they?

“I don’t think so,” Mike Haynes said. “I hope not.

“I think the guys are just devastated. We just can’t really believe the situation we’ve found ourselves in. There’s no question we’re better than our record.”

Who ain’t? Their record is only 3-7.

The amazing thing is that, unless everyone everywhere has lost the ability to discern talent, there is a good football team in there somewhere. It is in transition, however, from the glory days of 1980-83 to whatever lies ahead and so far the ride has been a little bumpy.

After last season’s 8-8 record, Davis added Bo Jackson, James Lofton, Mervyn Fernandez, Lionel Washington and half a ton of rookie blockers. Davis’ sunny demeanor in training camp suggested that he thought he had the project well in hand, but the whole thing has blown up in his face. Last season’s embarrassment is going to look good compared to this season’s 6-9, 5-10 or 4-11.

And the future is far from guaranteed.

Davis is no fool, and there is firepower sitting on top of firepower, but . . .

Who’s the quarterback going to be?

And even more important than that . . .

WHITHER BO?

How great is this guy?

Just warming up after a season away from the game, behind a brand new offensive line that can’t make anything else work, he’s averaging 6.2 yards a carry. Jim Brown, the man many regard as the best back in the history of the game, averaged 5.2. Marcus Allen, one of the game’s best backs, looks ordinary next to Bo.

Davis, remember, got Jackson with a seventh-round draft pick. So what do we have here? The coup of the ages, or a cruel hoax, Al’s folly?

Everything depends on which sport Jackson chooses. It has been generally assumed, here and in Kansas City, where he sat on the Royals’ bench for the last half of the baseball season, that Bo was eventually football-bound.

Upon arriving here, Jackson said he didn’t know. Then he effectively stopped talking. He has declined all interview requests by local reporters and has talked only after two of his four games. This week, he turned down requests from CBS, the Sporting News and Sport magazine.

A month ago, however, the week after he’d made his debut, he told the Kansas City Star’s Bob Nightengale, who covers the Royals:

“There’s going to be a time when I’m going to give up a sport. I know that. I never meant to be a dual athlete the rest of my life. If I did that, by the time I was 35, I’d feel like a 50-year-old man.

“So, I’ll tell you now and I want this to sink in: Baseball is what I’ll make a career out of, not football.

“Football is the sport I’ll give up first. The only question is when will I give this up? I don’t know right now. I’m just taking this one day at a time.”

The betting around the Raiders is that football will still prevail. Jackson seems a safe bet to return to the Royals next season, but if he struggles again, the Raiders could inherit all.

But it’s a high-stakes game they’re playing.

If they win, they may have the game’s finest runner.

If they lose, they’ve spent a year or two of valuable transition time on a road to nowhere. “If he goes back to Kansas City?” mused Long. “I’m going to buy a ticket in the 14th row and take my sniper rifle and assassinate him.”

MARC? RUSTY? PLUNK? VINCE? STEVIE? MR. X?

If there are three quick answers to what went wrong this season, they are as follows:

--Problems with the offensive line.

--Problems at cornerback.

--The continuing search for a quarterback.

Despite much gnashing of teeth, both among the players and the underlings in the front office in recent years, the Raiders have never really gone out and tried to find a quarterback.

The last one Davis really went after hard was John Elway, and that was four years ago.

In recent years, there were conversations about dumping Marc Wilson to the Philadelphia Eagles and acquiring Doug Williams from the Washington Redskins, or Neil Lomax from the St. Louis Cardinals, but they died.

The Williams-Lomax talks followed a similar pattern: Raiders offer No. 2 pick. Cards-Redskins ask for a No. 1. No deal.

It’s hindsight to note that both Lomax and Williams look pretty good now, but it’s true, too. However, at the time they were under consideration, there were questions about both, in the Raider front office and elsewhere.

But why didn’t Davis try to do some thing?

He thought he had an ace in the hole named Rusty Hilger.

Hilger has tools. He could run. He can throw deep. He has a quick release. He is cocky. Davis, a great admirer of his own ability to spot talent, liked him. There is no more certain guarantor of an opportunity for a Raider prospect than when the word comes down, “A.D. likes him.”

What Hilger lacked was experience. You might note that he never actually won the job. The Raiders just gave it to him.

He had a chance to step up and claim it as a dark horse last season, but he was shelled at San Francisco in the exhibition opener and set back for another year.

But after Wilson went down in flames, again, and Plunkett was hurt, again, Hilger was handed the No. 1 job for this season on a plate.

During the off-season, the coaching staff drilled him over and over. He was to stay within himself. Even though he is a good scrambler, they didn’t want him running all over the place. He was to stay in the pocket and re-ignite the famous Raider deep-strike game that nobody has seen in half a decade or so.

In the exhibition season, Hilger struggled. In the regular season, he succumbed.

He dutifully repressed the temptation to scramble, but he didn’t seem to pick up much going on downfield.

He seemed to check his poise at the sideline, too. When he started woofing at the New England Patriot defense after leading a touchdown drive in the fourth-quarter rally at New England, teammates’ eyebrows went up. When he came off the field at Minnesota with a list of explanations for the coaches about why a play hadn’t worked, a teammate told him to just shut up and play.

Finally, the Raiders returned to Wilson. He hasn’t been arch-successful either, but by now the offensive line is having so many problems, you can’t tell where its gaffes end and the quarterback’s begin.

What will the Raiders do for next season?

Re-sign Wilson? His $1 million-a-year contract is about to run out and they’ve been considering trading him, or paying him off for two years.

Give Hilger another shot?

Find a role for the about-to-turn-40 Jim Plunkett?

Vince Evans? There was speculation that he was going to stay No. 1 after the strike, until he threw that strike to Elvis Patterson of San Diego.

Steve Beuerlein? The rookie is on injured reserve but he has important boosters within the organization. They like the fact that at Notre Dame, he demonstrated real poise in a hot spot amid hard times.

Trade for somebody?

Wait and see. A Raider source suggests that there is no master plan right now. Like, Bo, they’re just taking it day by day.

NO OFFENSE

For three seasons after the Tampa Super Bowl, the Raiders seemed to ignore the aging of their offensive line. This season, though, they addressed it with a vengeance.

That didn’t work, either.

They drafted huge linemen with their Nos. 1 and 2 picks. In training camp, they put their venerable right side, Henry Lawrence and Mickey Marvin, on injured reserve, and subsequently cut Lawrence.

When the Patriots dropped former All-Pro Brian Holloway in what might or might not have been a labor squabble, the Raiders traded for him.

Raider officials believe that they have the bodies to get the job done, and they’re on the right track. Lines take time to establish. Cohesion is important and so far the Raiders have been singularly unlucky.

They seemed to be pulling for a unit of John Clay-Chris Riehm-Don Mosebar-Curt Marsh or Bill Lewis-Selby Jordan to start the season. But by the end of training camp, all but Mosebar and Clay had been injured, and Clay was switched from left tackle to right tackle. Clay has had his troubles but the Raiders, and scouts from other teams, still like him.

The Raiders compounded their problems, however, by trading tackle Bruce Davis and going to a new left side of Holloway-Lewis for the Minnesota game. Davis was 31 and something less than an Anthony Munoz, but he was reliable. He was also a long-time favorite of Davis. But when the Houston Oilers offered a No. 2 draft pick, if they make the playoffs, the Raiders couldn’t say yes fast enough.

Of course, the underlying assumption was that Holloway could still play. The Patriots said he was used up and tired of playing. Indeed, Holloway had announced this would be his last season, although after the trade, he said he might reconsider.

The Raiders, having run film of him all night and all day before making the deal, decided he could still play. Film, though, can be like statistics, in which the viewer-statistician takes the footage-data and makes it fit his own preconceptions.

And Holloway had other critics, including Raider players who faced him twice in the ’85 season, when he was still making the Pro Bowl. They thought he was overrated and looked better than he was because he was playing next to John Hannah. When Hannah retired, Holloway stopped making the Pro Bowl.

Holloway has had trouble in two of his three starts. At Minnesota, Chris Doleman beat him for two sacks and a holding call. The Denver Broncos’ Karl Mecklenburg beat him for two sacks last week.

After the game, a Raider said, “I don’t understand why we traded Bruce Davis.”

It bears repeating that the famous Raider deep-strike game still puts untoward pressure on the linemen and the quarterback, and that it has fallen flat since the Chicago Bears started the all-out blitzing vogue in 1984.

The Raiders are still loath to do a lot of things other teams do against blitzes. They rarely throw screen passes. They don’t bring their receivers across the field. A man running laterally is a lot easier to hit for a quarterback trying to make a “hot read” than one running straight down the sideline.

THERE GOES THE JUDGE

There was grumbling, low-level and otherwise, about the Raider cornerbacks, whose 1983 and ’84 invulnerability had worn off.

It burst into the open when Flores called Lester (the Judge) Hayes in before the opener and told him to retire or he’d be waived. Hayes protested that his toes were sore and was put on injured reserve.

The Raiders thought they had a replacement, Lionel Washington, acquired from the Cardinals. Cardinal Coach Gene Stallings, the former backfield coach at Dallas, insists on having defensive backs who can support against the run but the Raiders care little about that as long as they can cover man to man.

Washington, fast and athletic, had a fine reputation as a cover man. Giant quarterback Phil Simms told people he was glad to have Washington out of his division.

Washington has struggled here.

“It takes a certain temperament to be out there playing bump-and-run all the time,” said an opposing coach.

Maybe Washington is developing. He has been beaten several times when it looked as if he was in good position.

“The kid has just been unbelievably unlucky,” a Raider player said.

Mike Haynes has had similar woes in recent seasons, like the pass he batted off the face mask of the Vikings’ Hassan Jones, who caught it for a touchdown. For a cornerback who is out there in man-to-man coverage all the time, there is no such thing as a lot of bad luck. He either does the job or perishes, taking everyone around with him.

A year ago, when the Raiders were defensively sound, they made up for a shaky offense. This season, with problems on both units, the team spun out.

The defensive front operated in a funk during the strike and right after it but has rallied. The network color commentators keep asking where Howie Long is but every time you look up, he seems to be in the backfield, flailing away. The Raiders’ sack percentage ranks second in the league.

Pro Football Weekly, which keeps team statistics for just the non-strike games, shows the Raider defense to be No. 1 in fewest yards allowed, No. 9 against the rush, No. 2 in average gain-per-rush, No. 3 against the pass and No. 8 in points allowed.

The Raiders talk about playing more zone to take the heat off their cornerbacks. John Elway said last week, however, that they seem to be playing even more man-to-man than they used to.

And another thing: If the Raiders ever do start playing more zone, they’d better play it better than they do now.

THE ONCE AND FUTURE COACH

Despite gossip and speculation, Flores seems safe. Davis has never fired a coach and his confidants are broadcasting “predictions,” probably arrived at during off-the-record conversations with A.D., that he won’t fire Flores, that Flores is a friend.

This is simple justice, since Davis is as responsible as anyone for what has transpired.

The major personnel moves were his. His hands-on involvement has long been suspected to extend to making substitutions during games. When Wilson was benched in favor of Plunkett last season at Dallas, there was a report that Davis ordered it from the press box.

When the switch was made from Hilger to Wilson this season, it was similarly reported that Davis ordered it. Flores denied it.

It is possible that he and Davis arrived at the same conclusion at the same time, and that Wilson was already warming up when the word came. But there is no doubt that the word came. Several writers heard a Raider official in the press box relaying the order by telephone to the coaching staff.

Flores is unlikely to resign. He is steadier than John Madden, who fell on his own sword after a 9-7 record in 1978, two seasons after winning the Raiders’ first Super Bowl.

However, even Flores probably wouldn’t like to test the limits of Davis’ friendship by having another season like this one.