The Endless Downward Spiral

Last week Raider Nation witnessed a fat, drunken, date rapist of a place kicker lose a game for the actual football players. This week, it's the real players turn. Here is a list of quick bullet points of the things today that are making me want to kill things.

- Langston Walker, Cooper Carlisle, Samson Satele, Daniel Lober and Mario Henderson. OK, maybe it's not fair to Lober to include him in this, but at the same time, he's guilty by association. The o-line has been completely and totally overmatched today. The reason for this is that not a single one of them have business being on an NFL roster. Look, this isn't anything I haven't been screaming about for weeks and weeks. Robert Gallery's injury isn't the excuse. It's all about the lack of talent. Period. These are the guys Tom Cable wanted. None of them are capable of keeping a quarterback from getting killed. They have done nothing to fix this. Rotating your incapable players in and out with other incapable players does nothing to fix the problem. This, more than anything else, is why the Raiders lose close football games.

- The lack of anything resembling run defense. Week after week, the Raiders give up long touchdown runs. I'll cut Rolando McClain some slack, being that he's a rookie being asked to run a defense. He gets better each week, and makes most of his tackles. My beef is mostly with Tyvon Branch and Michael Huff. Branch made a name for himself mostly as a special teams player and finds himself as the starting strong safety. He's fast and occasionally makes the big pop that clears the cobwebs in Al Davis' brain long enough to have a brief Jack Tatum flashback. The thing that separates Branch and the Assassin is the fact that Jack Tatum actually made plays. He tackled people. He picked off passes. Tyvon does neither of these things, and each week running backs run through his polite embraces that he calls "tackles" and run for miles and miles. Free safety Michael Huff is pretty much the exact same player as Branch. He has done nothing to fulfill the hype that accompanied him out of Texas. They are both a liability and are by far the biggest weaknesses on the defensive side of the ball.

- Louis Murphy and Darius Heyward-Bey. On the Raiders final drive they both dropped would be first down passes. Murphy's muff was the worst because it ended up being picked. This isn't the first time Murphy has lost his focus at the worst possible time, and his mental lapses are getting to be particularly irritating. When he doesn't have his head up his ass, he's by far the best receiver the Raiders have. DHB is quickly becoming the master of the 1 catch box score. The Raiders keep telling us that he's making strides, but he has yet to put together two good games in a row. For a guy who is supposed to be a deep threat, he has yet to catch a deep bomb. I'm running out of patience with him.

-Johnnie Lee Higgins. 3 punt returns. 4 yards. And those all came on one return. Granted, the kick coverage has been crap, but on all 3 of those returns he would have been better off making fair catches. He pulls this crap week after week, and outside of a 54 yard return he had against the Rams, he has done nothing.

Sitting with a 1-3 record and San Diego coming to town next week, this year is already in danger of being the next in a seemingly endless line of double digit loss seasons. With our first round pick headed to New England next year, it looks like I might be actively rooting for a lock out.