Post by TheShadow on Dec 2, 2003 19:38:49 GMT -5
www.sfgate.com
BY Ray Ratto
Having done so well with his previous attempt at sloganeering, Bill ("We Must Be the Dumbest Team in America'') Callahan tried again Monday, with somewhat less success.
As part of his post-postgame analysis of Sunday's 22-8 loss to Denver, the Raiders' head coach decided he needed to soft-pedal Sunday's tart analysis by crediting his players with playing hard and trying their best, which under normal circumstances would be the minimal standard for employment in any walk of life.
So he decided to trot out a semantic pretzel for your nutritional benefit
-- "It's Not the Players, It's the Plays.''
As in, "The fellows are giving it their all, but their all just isn't working out very well.''
Whether this verbal hedging mollifies the dissatisfied corners of the Oakland locker room remains to be seen, but it isn't as though Callahan has a lot of other alternatives here.
He couldn't say, "I take it all back, they really played a smart football game Sunday,'' because that would be ridiculous. He couldn't say, "I watched the films, and I was wrong -- we're even dumber than I thought we were,'' because that would be gratuitous.
And he can't do the one thing that seems to works best in these situations -- fire a few guys.
That would be the approach you would see from coaches who have been granted full freedom of roster action -- your Bill Parcells, your Mike Shanahans, your Jon Grudens, your Mike Holmgrens, and a few more scattered here and there.
They would find ways to make living, breathing examples of the miscreants by benching them, or in some cases, simply cutting them outright. They would send the message Callahan says he is trying to impart, that slipshod play and needless penalties won't be tolerated, and the message would be easy to understand and hard to ignore:
"Hey, anyone seen Bob? He wasn't in the special-teams meeting. Maybe he has the flu.''
Bill Callahan isn't Parcells, or Shanahan, or Gruden, or Holmgren. He is your classic embattled coach, playing out the string on a lost season that could not have gone more horribly if the Raiders had become the Arizona Cardinals.
He has only as much power to change the Raiders' traditional ways as the players allow him to have, and the preponderance of available evidence is that they are disinclined to grant him that power.
He also has as much power as Al Davis intends for him to have, which traditionally has been as little as possible.
If this sounds like sympathy, trust us, it isn't. Nobody who takes this job has the illusion of controlling stock unless he wants to spend an awful lot of spare time raging against the machine (say, Gruden). Callahan knew what he was getting himself into, he just didn't think it would come so quickly.
For one, penalties are the Raiders' culture, and have been going back to the days of Dan Birdwell and Ben Davidson. Penalties are not something to be eliminated, but just another officiating conspiracy to overcome. If O.J. Santiago jumps offside on a 4th-and-4, or Charles Woodson roughs the passer at an inappropriate time, or Eric Barton clocks him 5 yards out of bounds, well, just get 'em next time, fellas.
For two, players frustrated when a season has gone inextricably wrong tend to ignore the detail work and just go out and smack someone -- occasionally when it can do the team some good, though that isn't always a prerequisite.
For three, the Raiders have so many players on injured reserve that anyone fired for poor performance would be replaced by the one player guaranteed to be worse -- nobody.
And for four, Bill Callahan has all the look of a short-timer, and short- timers are granted little slack from the employees. It's workplace Darwinism at its most basic.
Oh, he still will do all the things he's done before in an attempt to reassemble the troops for the final quarter of the season. To that end, he held a team meeting Monday to emphasize his "It's Not the Players, It's the Plays'' message. For all we know, he even might have handed out T-shirts with that message emblazoned on the back; we are fairly sure, in any event, that the shirts wouldn't have read "The Dumbest Team in America.''
And maybe the message will be absorbed the way Callahan would like, and the players now will devote themselves to the detail work that has escaped them so far and wrecked the Raiders' season.
But that isn't the way to bet. Seasons like this don't save themselves with a pep talk, and neither do phrases like "We must be the dumbest team in America when it comes to playing the game'' disappear with a disingenuous taken-out-of-context explanation.
It wasn't taken out of context. Bill Callahan meant what he said Sunday, and he said what he meant Monday. Today through ... well, we'll see.
BY Ray Ratto
Having done so well with his previous attempt at sloganeering, Bill ("We Must Be the Dumbest Team in America'') Callahan tried again Monday, with somewhat less success.
As part of his post-postgame analysis of Sunday's 22-8 loss to Denver, the Raiders' head coach decided he needed to soft-pedal Sunday's tart analysis by crediting his players with playing hard and trying their best, which under normal circumstances would be the minimal standard for employment in any walk of life.
So he decided to trot out a semantic pretzel for your nutritional benefit
-- "It's Not the Players, It's the Plays.''
As in, "The fellows are giving it their all, but their all just isn't working out very well.''
Whether this verbal hedging mollifies the dissatisfied corners of the Oakland locker room remains to be seen, but it isn't as though Callahan has a lot of other alternatives here.
He couldn't say, "I take it all back, they really played a smart football game Sunday,'' because that would be ridiculous. He couldn't say, "I watched the films, and I was wrong -- we're even dumber than I thought we were,'' because that would be gratuitous.
And he can't do the one thing that seems to works best in these situations -- fire a few guys.
That would be the approach you would see from coaches who have been granted full freedom of roster action -- your Bill Parcells, your Mike Shanahans, your Jon Grudens, your Mike Holmgrens, and a few more scattered here and there.
They would find ways to make living, breathing examples of the miscreants by benching them, or in some cases, simply cutting them outright. They would send the message Callahan says he is trying to impart, that slipshod play and needless penalties won't be tolerated, and the message would be easy to understand and hard to ignore:
"Hey, anyone seen Bob? He wasn't in the special-teams meeting. Maybe he has the flu.''
Bill Callahan isn't Parcells, or Shanahan, or Gruden, or Holmgren. He is your classic embattled coach, playing out the string on a lost season that could not have gone more horribly if the Raiders had become the Arizona Cardinals.
He has only as much power to change the Raiders' traditional ways as the players allow him to have, and the preponderance of available evidence is that they are disinclined to grant him that power.
He also has as much power as Al Davis intends for him to have, which traditionally has been as little as possible.
If this sounds like sympathy, trust us, it isn't. Nobody who takes this job has the illusion of controlling stock unless he wants to spend an awful lot of spare time raging against the machine (say, Gruden). Callahan knew what he was getting himself into, he just didn't think it would come so quickly.
For one, penalties are the Raiders' culture, and have been going back to the days of Dan Birdwell and Ben Davidson. Penalties are not something to be eliminated, but just another officiating conspiracy to overcome. If O.J. Santiago jumps offside on a 4th-and-4, or Charles Woodson roughs the passer at an inappropriate time, or Eric Barton clocks him 5 yards out of bounds, well, just get 'em next time, fellas.
For two, players frustrated when a season has gone inextricably wrong tend to ignore the detail work and just go out and smack someone -- occasionally when it can do the team some good, though that isn't always a prerequisite.
For three, the Raiders have so many players on injured reserve that anyone fired for poor performance would be replaced by the one player guaranteed to be worse -- nobody.
And for four, Bill Callahan has all the look of a short-timer, and short- timers are granted little slack from the employees. It's workplace Darwinism at its most basic.
Oh, he still will do all the things he's done before in an attempt to reassemble the troops for the final quarter of the season. To that end, he held a team meeting Monday to emphasize his "It's Not the Players, It's the Plays'' message. For all we know, he even might have handed out T-shirts with that message emblazoned on the back; we are fairly sure, in any event, that the shirts wouldn't have read "The Dumbest Team in America.''
And maybe the message will be absorbed the way Callahan would like, and the players now will devote themselves to the detail work that has escaped them so far and wrecked the Raiders' season.
But that isn't the way to bet. Seasons like this don't save themselves with a pep talk, and neither do phrases like "We must be the dumbest team in America when it comes to playing the game'' disappear with a disingenuous taken-out-of-context explanation.
It wasn't taken out of context. Bill Callahan meant what he said Sunday, and he said what he meant Monday. Today through ... well, we'll see.