A Return to the Chamber of Horrors : Raiders: Biggest game of season couldn’t have come at a worse time--against Seahawks at Kingdome.

Oooh, not this place again . . .

Of all the possible venues for the Raiders’ most important game, they get this house of horrors where they have been used as a punching bag for most of the decade. They’re 1-6 since Chuck Knox arrived here in 1983, and their misadventures have been landmarks in their decline.

Here’s how it has been, game by grisly game:

1983--Seahawks 38, Raiders 36. Quarterback Jim Zorn goes four for 16 . . . and the Seahawks still roll up 38 points, helped by eight Raider turnovers. The Raiders also take eight sacks but don’t worry about it for long. They are en route to a Super Bowl championship.

1984 (regular season)--Seahawks 17, Raiders 14. Marc Wilson, who hurt the thumb on his throwing hand the week before in a gruesome loss at Chicago, throws three interceptions to go with his team’s three lost fumbles. The Raiders take four sacks.

1984 (playoffs)--Seahawks 13, Raiders 7. The defending Super Bowl champions are stunned in a game of Neanderthal Ball. A plodder named Dan Doornink runs for 126 yards, the Seahawks for 205. Jim Plunkett, returned to the starting job after 10 weeks away, is sacked six times.

The ex-champions erupt in a spate of finger-pointing.

Al Davis, who had thought he had a dynasty, laments Coach Tom Flores’ game plan. “We didn’t challenge them,” Davis said.

Lyle Alzado said: “We had no offense. So we got beat. It’s as simple as that. . . . Our offense didn’t do anything .”

1985--Seahawks 33, Raiders 3. The Raiders’ worst loss since the move from Oakland.

They are up to here with this place, but the harder they try, the behinder they get.

They bring in concert stereo speakers for practices to simulate the Kingdome din. Wilson is instructed to step back from center if he can’t hear, and the referee will take an officials’ timeout. Wilson, who has been brought along slowly as Marcus Allen’s rushing leads the Raiders to a 6-2 start, is told to open up. (Remember Davis’ criticism?)

On the first play, Wilson steps away from center . . . and gets a delay-of-game penalty.

His first pass is a bomb for Jessie Hester. It’s a high pop fly that Seahawk safety John Harris almost has to fair-catch.

Wilson throws three more interceptions, including one that Terry Taylor returns 75 yards for a touchdown. Byron Walker returns a blocked Chris Bahr field-goal attempt 56 yards for a touchdown. The Raiders take their customary six sacks.

1986--Seahawks 37, Raiders 0. Their new worst loss since coming to Los Angeles.

They are 8-5 and playoff-bound, they think, but this loss, a week after Allen’s fumble cost them an overtime game against the Eagles, continues the plummet to 8-8.

As usual: three interceptions--one each by Plunkett, Wilson and Rusty Hilger--and 11 sacks. Of the first five times Plunkett drops back to pass, he’s sacked three times.

“We can’t beat these guys here,” Lester Hayes said. “They could give us an all-star team and we couldn’t beat them. It’s a Seahawk-ism.

“This is the only place where the 45-man unit has some doubt. There’ll be doubt if we play here till 1990. So be it.”

1987--Raiders 37, Seahawks 24. A shocker, since the Raiders came in 3-7, with a seven-game losing streak, and the Seahawks were 7-3.

Bo Jackson gains 221 yards and scores three touchdowns. He runs 91 yards for one and plows through Brian Bosworth for another. Wilson plays brilliantly. The Raiders get 356 rushing yards.

1988--Seahawks 35, Raiders 27--The Raiders can’t stop the Seahawk rushing game. Curt Warner gets 130 yards and John L. Williams 105.

First-year quarterback Steve Beuerlein comes in, having completed 13 of his last 42 passes, goes four for 19 and is benched for the rest of the season.

Jackson is held to 31 yards in 13 carries.

For the Raiders, the happy fact is these are barely the same Seahawks.

They are 2-4 in the Kingdome this season.

Their running game is a memory. Warner and Williams are averaging 3.5 yards a carry and their average per game, 91.7 yards, is worse than for any season in their history, including the expansion season of 1976. Warner, 28, has had major surgery and arthroscopic surgery on his right knee and may be on his way out. He interrupted his funk recently to remark, “Hey, tell everybody I’m not finished.”

A year ago, the Seahawks were No. 8 in the league in rushing. Now they’re No. 24.

The Seahawks couldn’t stop the rush a year ago when they were No. 24.

They still can’t. They are still No. 24.

For the Raiders, however, the unhappy fact is that the Seahawks are a streaky team on a two-game winning streak, including a surprising upset of the Bengals in Cincinnati.

For the Raiders, another unhappy fact is they’ve seen better days, themselves.

Beuerlein is struggling again. He is 22 for his last 53 passes.

The Raiders have backed up since their four-game stretch as dominators in October.

That month, against the hard-running Kansas City Chiefs, Washington Redskins, Bengals and Eagles, they outrushed their opposition by an average of 169 to 94 yards a game.

In their present three-game winning streak, they are down to a 121-102 edge. All three games were at home, against opponents who didn’t need the win, two of whom--Phoenix and New England--were going nowhere. Nevertheless, the Raiders were fighting for their lives in all three fourth quarters.

Well, 1990 is just around the corner, and the Raiders are going to have to overcome their doubts here if they want to enter it as players.

That’s a real-ism.

Raider Notes

A Raider victory makes them odds-on for a wild-card berth. A loss makes them a longshot. If they lose, they will probably need a win in their finale--on the road, against the New York Giants, who may need the victory to play host to the NFC wild-card game against the Rams. . . . Raider Coach Art Shell, on quarterback Steve Beuerlein: “The thing I tell Steve is what I told him on the sideline: ‘The only thing you can do when you’re struggling like that, you have to go back to the basics. Sit back, take a look at the coverage, read it, recognize where the ball has to go and then deliver it there.’ He’s young. He’s going to have games like that. He’s not a Joe Montana. He hasn’t been around long enough to be that kind of quarterback right now. But the more he plays, the better he’s going to get.”

Is linebacker Jerry Robinson the problem in the Raider decline against the rush? In the three games leading up to his knockout by Redskin Jim Lachey on an interception return, the Raiders held opponents to an average of 78 yards rushing a game. Only one opponent, the Eagles, went over 100, and that was due to quarterback Randall Cunningham’s 57 yards scrambling. In the six games since Robinson’s concussion, the Raiders have held only one opponent to fewer than 122 yards on the ground and have been outrushed three times. . . . Add Robinson: He’s supposed to be protected from offensive linemen, but he’s said to be spending a lot of time taking on the guards, to whom the 225-pounder gives away 50 pounds. An ex-teammate says: “I wish they’d switch J.R. back outside where he belongs.” . . . Shell took the low-key route on the noise factor, since nothing else seems to work any better. “I’ve gone through that (simulated crowd noise for practice),” he said. “I didn’t think it made any difference. You still couldn’t hear. Tried earplugs. Tried taping over ear holes. Tried it all. You try everything you can. Each guy just has to attune himself to the quarterback’s voice and decipher it out of all that, pull it out of there somehow or other. If you’re moving the ball down the field, you can take the crowd out of it. But the moment you don’t move the ball, turn the ball over or whatnot, they’ll get louder and louder. That’s just the nature of the beast.”

In their heyday, the Seahawks ranked at the top in turnover ratio, practicing defensive coordinator Tom Catlin’s tackle-the-ball dictum. Now they’re minus-13, which makes them No. 24 in the league. . . . Shell says Seahawk wide receiver Steve Largent’s level of play “is still there,” adding: “Football may miss him, but we won’t.” Largent, however, has only 25 catches this season, and five touchdowns in his last 28 games. The new Seahawk threat is Brian Blades, who has 72 catches. . . . Where have you gone, Brian Bosworth? At the end of his third season, he’s again on injured reserve. He doesn’t come around the team much, since he reportedly doesn’t like them and vice versa. The Seahawks are expected to take another look at him next summer, since he has little trade value.