Commentary : Shanahan Fired; Raiders Pick Shell : Davis’ Move Lacks Timing and Is Unfair to Both Men

For the last couple of weeks, some Raider officials have been quietly attacking their young coach, Mike Shanahan, dropping hints that he had proved ineffective and too young to run a National Football League team.

And, under cover, Raider owner Al Davis has been the principal rumor spreader.

That created a football climate of inevitability in Los Angeles.

Day-in and day-out attacks often change doubt into certainty.

Thus when the Raiders fired Shanahan Tuesday, it seemed as if the move had been inevitable--although it hadn’t been.

The coach merely took the fall for an organization that since the mid-1980s has brought in too many losing players.

The last coach, Tom Flores, a Super Bowl winner, was the first to discover that. The real question today is whether, down the road a piece, Art Shell will be the third.

As the first black man to coach an NFL team since the 1920s, Shell is taking over at the wrong time and place. If he is the league’s greatest coach since Vince Lombardi, he has a chance. If he isn’t, he will find it very tough going on a team that is pushing its many problems off onto him.

Indeed, the Raiders are being unfair to this particular man, who is a nice guy and a knowledgeable coach. They are asking him to correct their mistakes.

If he can, he should be the next commissioner. Or at least the next owner.

Shell moved up to become the NFL’s first modern-era black coach on the day that Cito Gaston of the Toronto Blue Jays became the first black to manage a baseball playoff team.

They made history Tuesday in El Segundo and Oakland, and in both instances it was history long delayed.

There have been only three other black managers in baseball, Lary Doby, Maury Wills and the leader of this year’s Baltimore Orioles, Frank Robinson, who narrowly missed the playoffs himself, finishing two games out with a team that never folded after leading most of the season.

The NFL’s first black coach, Fritz Pollard, served in the league’s prehistory, leading a club known as the Hammond (Ind.) Pros after the college season was over from 1923 through ’25. Pollard’s Pros finished 1-5-1, 2-2-1 and 1-4.

On first inspection, the Shell-Gaston parallel seems close. Both were promoted with the 1989 season under way, Gaston succeeding Jimy Williams last May.

If Gaston could advance a baseball team with a 12-24 record into an 89-79 winner--making the best record in the majors, 77-49, since May 15--will the world now expect Shell to boost a 1-3 Raider team to the playoffs?

That is Shell’s challenge, and it’s an unfair one because baseball and football are very different games. Ballclubs change managers all the time, with all kinds of results.

Football teams, playing 16-game schedules, make midseason coaching changes only out of desperation, and usually only as a cover for management’s mistakes.

If Raider owner Davis wanted a black coach, he should have hired him when he took Shanahan on, or, at the latest, this spring--giving Shell the time to establish his kind of team.

With the season under way, it is impractical in pro football, if not impossible, to haul in a coach from another state. The only real Raider option was to promote an assistant.

For promoting Shell, Davis will be remembered as the first NFL owner to hire a black coach, but he will be getting more credit than he deserves. His timing is unacceptable.

There are reasons pro football has been slower than baseball to hire black chiefs.

Baseball is a sport of individuals. By and large, baseball players are paid on their individual statistics, not on the achievements of their team.

There are powerful financial reasons for a batter to get a hit every time up, regardless of whether his side is winning or losing by, say, 10 runs, and regardless of what he personally thinks of his manager, his owner, or even his teammates.

By contrast, football is more of a team sport. The Super Bowl is seldom won by the NFL’s best congregation of football players. It is usually won by that year’s best team--provided it isn’t too crippled by injuries.

Some of the NFL’s wisest scouts and assistant coaches today estimate that there are no more than eight or 10 fully competent head coaches.

And because there are 28 teams, those without all want one of the eight or 10.

The probability is that, in terms of percentage, there are as many qualified black candidates for head coach, here or anywhere, as there are white candidates.

But in choosing head coaches, most NFL club owners have been badly burned, some of them over and over. The more experience they get in football, the more they understand the complexities of the coach’s job. And in their view, to hire a black coach is simply to add one more complicating factor.

So in each of the last 60 years, they simply wouldn’t do it, and they’re still running scared.

For years, football teams wouldn’t have black quarterbacks, either, but as of 1989, the NFL’s quarterback models are Warren Moon and Randall Cunningham. And by the year 2000, there may well be more black than white quarterbacks.

The NFL should be hiring more Art Shells, too, and if it had a Central Casting office resembling IBM’s, or that of General Motors, it would. But as long as individual owners run the clubs, it’s likely that they will continue to run scared.