FanPost

Report: Lane Kiffin to be fired as soon as Monday

ESPN's Chris Mortensen is reporting that Lane Kiffin is expected to be fired as soon as Monday, regardless of the outcome of today's game in Kansas City.  This would be a really sad day to be a Raiders fan, as I believe Kiffin to be the best coach they've had since Jon Gruden.  They're still losing, but the direction of the team looked much better last season than it had since at least the Gruden days.

Kiffin became known for being extremely candid with the media, which I suspect did not make Al Davis especially happy.  He indicated this week that he had no say whatsoever what happened with the defense, and he believed that some more blitzing would have been in order last week, but it wasn't up to him.

Davis has a long history of hiring young, offensive-minded Head Coaches, and of controlling the defense himself, through a hand-picked Defensive Coordinator.  See here and here.  The Head Coach is not part of the process of defensive game planning.  The acrimony between Kiffin and Davis reportedly began in the offseason, when Kiffin wanted to fire Rob Ryan as Defensive Coordinator, and hire his father Monte to replace him.  (Ryan wanted to leave to go the Jets and work for his old buddy Eric Mangini, too, as a side note.)

Anybody who says that the Raiders are in a down cycle is delusional.  They will continue to be terrible until Al Davis dies, and the team is sold to somebody who will hire smart football people to run it.  No good coach will ever take the Head Coach's job there again, because this very public breakdown reinforces the reality, that it's impossible to be successful under the constraints of Big Al.  I feel for Raiders fans, who have to continue to tolerate it, and I empathize with the mean-looking guy who was practically in tears on Monday night.

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