Raider Elders Still Command Respect

Between them, Jerry Rice, Tim Brown and Rich Gannon have 45 years of NFL experience. Not counting this wonderful year the three are playing for the Oakland Raiders.

The Raiders beat the San Diego Chargers, 34-24, Sunday at Network Associates Coliseum to improve to 7-2. That ties Oakland for the best record in the AFC.

You want to say the NFL is for the young and hip? Rice, Brown and Gannon will smile and say young and hip is also callow and stupid when it comes to knowing about professional football.

The Raiders’ postgame radio broadcast is sponsored by a condom company. The pregame parking lot partyers seem to be an average age of 25, and an average mental age of 16, and this doesn’t make the NFL unhappy.

Go young to survive in the sporting world. Skew young. Attract young. Be young. If you’re over 40 it doesn’t matter what you watch on television, listen to on your CD player, or what you buy to eat or drink or wear. Advertisers don’t care. Wide receivers who are closer to 40 than 30? Who needs them?

And yet the three most important Raiders on the football field offer up 45 years of getting hit and giving hits, 45 years of tears and cheers, 45 years of learning so many things about professional football, about how precious every point, every catch, every throw, every championship is, how horrible every dropped pass, every interception, every lost yard, lost game, lost season is.

Gannon, 35, threw four touchdown passes against the Chargers. Three of them went to the 39-year-old Rice. The other went to the 35-year-old Brown.

Rice caught eight passes for 131 yards. Brown caught six for 62. Both men ran hard and fast. Both treasure each pass route as something to be completed with the same precision a scientist needs to split an atom. There is no step wasted. No lazy steps or ill-considered moves.

There are young men on the local college football teams, young men such as USC’s Kareem Kelly and UCLA’s Brian Poli-Dixon, who may have as much athletic skill as Rice, who may have the same kind of strong bodies and fast legs. And so what?

They don’t seem to understand the urgency of every step, the way each decision a receiver makes matters to the quarterback. They don’t quite get how a receiver needs to run every route with the same intensity because the one time he takes a play off, the one moment he thinks it’s OK to cheat a little, skip a step, take a shortcut, that’s the time the ball will drop just beyond his grasp.

“Everything you do matters,” Rice said after the game.

“Sometimes you see kids with all the talent in the world and they want to coast sometimes,” Brown said. “Will they ever learn? I hope so. Because it’s an honor to play this game.”

And it’s an honor to watch these guys.

Gannon played college football at Delaware and has played for four NFL teams. Until Jon Gruden became the Raider coach, no one much appreciated Gannon’s soft voice, stout heart, savvy mind and reliable arm.

All those characteristics were on display in the fourth quarter, after the Chargers had tied the score, 24-24.

Gannon, who is supposed to be slow-footed, scrambled for 21 yards on one play of the 65-yard drive. He threw short passes to Charlie Garner and Terry Kirby out of the backfield and a 20-yard touchdown pass to Rice with 2:46 left in the game.

Oh, that Rice.

After an astounding career with the San Francisco 49ers, after winning MVP awards and Super Bowls and making himself a certain hall of fame selection, Rice felt the 49ers nudging him into oblivion, telling him it was time to go away, time for the next generation.

So Rice came to the Raiders. His hair is in cornrows. He wears beads on the bottom of each little braid. He is sly. You want young? Rice will be young.

On his game-winning catch, Rice beat a 24-year-old cornerback, Lloyd Harrison, at the line of scrimmage, left Harrison behind, stuck in a low gear while Rice went into a higher one. Rice ran his perfect route all alone.

When Gannon threw the ball, Rice was where he was supposed to be. Tay Cody, a 24-year-old rookie, grabbed wildly, hopelessly at Rice’s waist as Rice ran with the ball through the end zone and into the “Black Hole,” that place where all those young Raider fans foam at the mouth and yell things from the stands behind the end zone.

“You get in those positions, a close game in the fourth quarter, a game you’re supposed to win,” Rice said, “you get to the point where you have to score, that’s when the veterans need to step up. I know how to not waste energy. I feel like I know how to run good routes.

“I’m not sure everybody appreciates that anymore, guys who have the discipline to run the good route. Nobody talks about that on TV. ‘Oh, Jerry, he runs a good route.’ All they talk about is the fast guy or the guy who can sky to catch a pass. But you don’t win only with your speed in this league. Or at least not all the time.”

This was the first time in nearly two years that Rice has had a 100-yard receiving game. It was the first time in six years that he has scored three touchdowns in a game.

“I’m feeling a lot more comfortable here,” Rice said. “The explosion is still there. I still feel like I can run away from guys.”

“If people say Jerry has slowed down, well, I just don’t see that,” Gannon said. “Watch him at the line of scrimmage. His burst in the first 10, 15 yards? It’s as good as anybody in football.”

It’s true what they say--everything old is new again.

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Out of Electricity

Charger quarterback Doug Flutie has plummeted back to Earth, averaging only 10 completions and 108 yards passing over his last three starts. A comparison of how Flutie did in his first six games and in his last three:

(Tabular data not included)

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com