This Football Blog

Scott Brodeur at Blog Beat, who apparently is all about professional athletes acting like shitheads today, emailed to make sure I saw what Geep at The Sports Frog has to say about Raiders DBs Charles Woodson and Marques Anderson being arrested for public intoxication early this morning. Scott was making a rather transparent (and entirely friendly and well-meant) attempt to push me to tap into some of the anger with which I appear to be overflowing this afternoon.

“Oooh, attacking your squad — with cheap shots. Deserved cheap shots. But cheap shots, nonetheless!” he exclaimed electronically (really? an exclamation point? ’cause that just seems like a lot of energy to expend on such a statement).

I can’t get too upset about the alleged cheap shots there, though. Because, as I see it, Geep is going easy on these guys.

Seriously, what the fuck is up with these guys? What’s us with this team? And what the hell is Norv Turner gonna do about it?

All this shit just tells me it’s gonna be years and years (a decade or more, maybe) before the Raiders field a good team again. These guys can’t get even the simplest shit together. And you’ve got players doing what exactly? Celebrating? Was this act of idiocy the culmination of a night of celebration for the teams fifth fucking victory of the season? I sure as hell hope not. Because congratulations, assholes, you made it to 5-9. And you did it by just getting by a 4-10 team on a four-game losing streak.

But it can’t be that, because neither of those guys actually did anything in Sunday’s 40-35 win over the Tennessee Titans. Woodson sat on the sidelines nursing a booboo. And Anderson recorded a tackle. A tackle. (Of course, the sad thing is that tackle probably made Anderson a stats leader for the Raiders secondary in a game in which the team gave up 466 net passing yards and four passing touchdowns.)

It’s gotta just be that this is a team that is directionless, suffering from poor leadership from both its owner and coach and clearly incapable of finding a way to get its shit together. These guys should be dumped. Both of them. Not because what they did was so awful, but because of what their behavior reveals about their attitude, what that attitude represents, and what they represent, which is everything that’s wrong with this team. A truly great coach, a guy like Paul Brown, wouldn’t even have entertained tolerating this shit. They’d be gone. (And, yes, I know there’s a collective bargaining agreement and a salary cap and you can’t just go firing guys for getting drunk. So it’s not that I actually expect these guys to get canned. I’m just making a point.) Certainly, neither of them should see the field for the balance of this season.

And you know, there more I think about this, the more it burns me up. Here’s one guy (Woodson) who should be taking it easy until he gets healthy again and another who should be working on getting better at his job. Instead, they’re out boozing it up and acting like assholes the night after a game.

And it’s not like I thought the Raiders were gonna make a sudden run for the playoffs this season or anything (because it was clear by about week three or four that the team’s next post season appearance is gonna be some time coming), but I’d still hoped this team, having bottomed out (or so I thought) last year, was on the way back up. It’s depressing to get new evidence of how wrong I was.