Falling Into a Black Hole

The dust has settled, the epic collapse of the Oakland Raiders complete. The coach is gone. The season is gone. Even the trademark hubris is on hiatus.

“There are years of glory, there are a few years of defeat,” Raider owner Al Davis said. “And make no mistake about it, 2003 was a year of defeat.”

How could such fissures form in a proud franchise that had clawed its way back to prominence after wallowing through five non-winning seasons in the last half of the 1990s? A year ago, the Raiders were preparing to play Tampa Bay in the Super Bowl, their first appearance in the championship game since the 1983 season. Now they’re left to poke through the rubble of a 4-12 season and search for reasons why things unraveled so quickly.

Was the hangover of their 48-21 loss in the Super Bowl too much to overcome? Were players turned off by the criticism of former coach Bill Callahan, who would near the end of the season call the Raiders “the dumbest team in America”?

Was it a combination of age and injuries that had the team circling the drain? When troubled center Barret Robbins went AWOL in Tijuana the night before the Super Bowl, did the entire team go south with him? Or did the offense tune out its quarterback when Rich Gannon had a self-described “emotional eruption” at training camp?

For the hot-tempered Gannon, Fridays turned into fry days.

“Friday practices in the past for us have been nothing short of phenomenal and spectacular,” he said. “I mean, we go out there for a 30-minute walk-through where we have a 30-play segment, and historically you might have one or two mental errors. And then that would be followed up by a three-template drive for the offense. And if you had a mental error in that period, it was very unusual. The ball never touched the ground. It was crisp, it was clean, people were flying around.

“And that somehow dissipated for us. It was very normal this year to go out on a Friday and have six or eight mental errors in the walk-through, followed by another four or five in the practice period -- balls touching the ground, guys not sure what to do, guys not knowing where to line up, guys dropping balls. It was disgraceful.”

Strapped to the front of the Raider roller coaster was Callahan, who in 11 months went from coach-of-the-year candidate to a disgraced ex-employee, a man so loathed by some of his players that they had to suppress the urge to punch him. This month, shortly before being hired as coach of the Nebraska Cornhuskers, Callahan denied that things had reached that point with the Raiders. But, in an interview with the NFL Network, receiver Tim Brown said players were teetering on the verge of mutiny.

“It got to a point where we’re literally telling guys in the locker room, ‘Nobody hit this guy, OK?’ ” Brown said. “It’s to that point where you think somebody is going to take a shot at him. And obviously you didn’t want that to happen, because now you’ve got something really ugly going on.”

It’s hard to imagine things getting much uglier for the Raiders, whose finish matched their worst record since owner Al Davis arrived in 1963. Bruce Allen, the team’s de facto general manager and the son of Hall of Fame coach George Allen, left the Raiders after the season to assume the same role with the Buccaneers. And, suddenly, the Oakland franchise was in flux. Davis, who conducted a news conference last week for the first time in nearly two years, downplayed the loss of Allen.

“I believe young people should go,” he said. “No one in our executive organization has ever had a contract. If you’re young and you want to go, and you want to be your own man and see if you can be a general manager, I encourage it.”

Davis has promoted Mike Lombardi, director of pro personnel, to fill the void left by Allen. But the Raiders remain the only NFL team without a head coach, and Davis has not set a timetable for hiring one.

The organization’s remaining cornerstones are Davis, always the team’s final decision maker, and chief executive Amy Trask, who joined the Raiders in 1987 and has emerged as one of the most powerful women in sports. She and Davis said the notion that the Raiders are in disarray was wrong.

“In Week 1, the world looked a lot different to the New England Patriots’ fans than it looks right now,” she said, referring to the Patriots’ 31-0 loss to Buffalo in the opener. “ ‘Disarray’ is thrown around a lot in this industry.”

Trask is not only the team’s top executive, she has a law degree. An understanding of the law is a must for executives of an NFL franchise seemingly always embroiled in one court case or another.

The latest legal skirmish is internal. Davis is being sued by the family of the late E.J. McGah, which owns a share of the team. The family claims Davis has misused team funds for personal gain and has denied the family access to Raider financial records.

That suit was filed in October, two months after a Sacramento Superior Court jury awarded the Raiders $34.2 million in the team’s suit against the city of Oakland and Oakland Coliseum officials. Davis was angling for more than $1 billion and claimed he was lured back to Oakland from Los Angeles in 1995 by fraudulent promises of sellouts. The jury threw out the accusations of fraud, instead finding the officials acted negligently.

Although it was technically a partial victory for the Raiders, the ruling and relatively nominal payout was a disappointment for a franchise that could have had serious leverage against the city had the award been larger. It was just one of the many setbacks the Raiders endured in 2003.

Robbins, an All-Pro center who has bipolar disorder, went on a drinking binge and missed curfew the night before the Super Bowl. Callahan sent him home before the game. He later would go through drug and alcohol rehabilitation and go some distance toward repairing his life, his family and his football career. It turned out to be one of the few positives in a season marked by the convergence of bad behavior, bad coaching decisions, bad injuries and bad karma.

Linebacker Bill Romanowski, who once spit in the face of former San Francisco receiver J.J. Stokes during a “Monday Night Football” game, punched teammate Marcus Williams in the eye during practice at training camp. Williams, a reserve tight end, suffered a fractured eye socket, which ended his season and possibly his career. He is suing Romanowski, whose transgression led to a slap-on-the-wrist penalty of a one-day suspension and a fine equal to a game check.

Callahan gathered the offense after a miserable performance in the exhibition season and assured the players things would be clicking once the regular season began. The meeting still incenses Gannon.

“I had an emotional eruption, if you will,” Gannon said later. “I disputed a lot of what he said because I knew it not to be true. I felt like I had been in the league 17 years, I’ve been in this system a very long time, and I saw things that were happening that weren’t consistent with what I believe to be the way we practice, the way we prepare. We were beginning to compromise the integrity of the system.”

After a 31-10 loss at Denver in Week 3, Oakland offensive players complained that opposing defenses knew exactly what was coming. “People are onto us right now,” receiver Jerry Rice said. “They’ve got our number. We have to regroup and start doing things a little more different. I’m not saying we’re predictable, but when you’ve got opponents calling out the plays ... then we’ve got a problem.”

When receiver Jerry Porter fully recovered from an injury, Callahan quietly moved him into the starting lineup ahead of Brown, a Pro Bowl receiver with a reputation for putting his own interests first. After he was fired, Callahan told radio talk show host James Brown that his relationship with Tim Brown was never the same after that.

“From there on, he did nothing but complain about that role,” Callahan said of the 37-year-old receiver. “With all due respect to his illustrious career, it’s nothing personal, but that was one of the points of contention during the year.”

Seven current or former Raiders are among 10 NFL players subpoenaed to testify as witnesses before a federal grand jury in San Francisco investigating a Burlingame nutritional supplement laboratory. The subpoenas proved to be another embarrassment for the franchise.

Gannon, the league’s reigning most valuable player, went down because of a shoulder injury in a hope-crushing 17-10 loss to Kansas City at home. In a cruel twist, the Raiders came oh so close to a touchdown on the game’s last play, but Brown was stopped six inches short of the goal line as time expired.

Gannon’s injury led to season-ending shoulder surgery. By season’s end, there were 12 players on injured reserve -- nine starters.

In an October interview with ESPN, cornerback Charles Woodson blasted Callahan, saying the coach’s ego prevented him from listening to the advice of veteran offensive players. Offensive lineman Frank Middleton publicly criticized the coach for his habit of slapping players with fines for petty infractions. The coach subsequently disclosed he hadn’t spoken with Woodson in a month.

After his Raiders dropped to 3-9 with a 22-8 loss to Denver in which they had 11 penalties, three fumbles and no touchdowns, Callahan was seething. “We must be the dumbest team in America in terms of playing the game,” he fumed, creating video fodder that would haunt him for weeks.

That didn’t go over well with players. “I can’t believe a grown man would call another grown man dumb,” Woodson said when informed of the comment. “If he said we’re dumb, he’s dead wrong. You’re talking about all of us, unless you call somebody out.”

The season ended for the Raiders at San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium, the spot where 11 months earlier they had taken the field with such hope. Woodson and running back Charlie Garner weren’t around for the game, though. They missed curfew the night before and were informed by Callahan that they had been benched. Then the coach sent them home.

In an interview with Sporting News Radio after he was fired, Callahan painted a bleak picture of the team’s lack of discipline: “You can’t have players sleeping in meetings and coming in late to work, missing mandatory team functions and curfews and expect the product on the field to be disciplined and entertaining. I’m a firm believer that what happens on Sunday is a direct reflection of what happens in your preparation on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. My expectations are that they show up on time, pay attention to detail and produce.”

Gannon said he agrees the team lacked discipline, but he said it also lacked direction. He said coaches were too hasty in trying to tweak an offense that Jon Gruden had spent four seasons building.

“At every training camp I’ve ever been, you always have to start at the beginning. It’s like learning how to take the snap from center, learning how to take a five-step drop, learning how to run an in-route and learning how to run a wide route if you’re a back,” Gannon said in a revealing sit-down talk with reporters after the season. “We skipped right through that and went right to 400-level courses and started talking about no-huddle package and different things.

“So, when I go back and look at it, one of the mistakes we made as an organization was that we went through training camp and we were trying to focus on changing and evolving and doing things differently than we did a year ago without taking the young players, not only the young players but even the older players, and reinstalling and re-teaching and starting from scratch and learning how to run this system of football.

“And so in some situations that hurt us. We skipped the ABCs and went to advanced learning, and it hurt some of our younger players and even some of the older players.”

The pressure took a toll on Gannon, who several times was caught by TV cameras screaming at Callahan, offensive coordinator Marc Trestman and teammates.

Once, after a Bay Area newspaper reporter suggested the Raiders might shake things up by inserting backup quarterback Marques Tuiasosopo for a series, Gannon advised him to “get off the crack pipe.”

“I sit today feeling like in some small way I have to defend myself, and defend my performance over the last five years here,” Gannon said. “I’ve gone to four straight Pro Bowls, I’ve been the MVP in two of them, I was the MVP of the league a year ago, and this team has won with me. In a short period of 6 1/2 weeks, I can no longer play, and I’m too old, I lost my effectiveness. It’s a disgrace. It’s disrespectful to me.

“Some of the articles and some of the media were just brutal. But I took it.... I felt it was my job, my duty, my responsibility, like I always do, to stand there and take the brunt of the blows.... I tried to deflect as much attention away from the play calling, the coaches, the receivers, the backs, the line as I possibly could, because I feel like that’s my job.

“However, unlike any other organization I’ve ever been part of, when you’re getting beat down, and you hold on to that rope, usually the way it works is someone ... whether it’s a coach or another player, grabs a hold of the rope after two or three weeks and they take it and run with it. Unfortunately, everyone was comfortable with me taking the beatdown.”

Gannon’s future with the team is uncertain. He’s due to make $7 million next season, and he’s coming off shoulder surgery. He says he wants to return, but, at 38, he’s clearly in the twilight of his career. The same goes for Brown and the 41-year-old Rice. None of them wants to go out on this note.

“We all have to accept responsibility for what transpired this year,” Gannon said. “This is a complete embarrassment to this organization, you know, for the players, and for the coaches, and for the owner, and for everybody involved, general manager. We all have to accept responsibility.”

When Davis spoke to reporters last week for the first time in nearly two years, it was more about damage control than accepting responsibility.

“For those of you who think that my hand is in everything they do,” he said, “this is a perfect example that it isn’t in everything they do. I’m just going to be closer to it so that I see what’s happening. And if no one else will dominate it and cut it out, then I’ll go in and dominate it and cut it out.”

Later in the news conference, a reporter offhandedly asked Davis, “How you doing?”

“I don’t know,” Davis said, capturing in three words the uncertainty of his entire empire.