The Winning Mentality

I'm going to indulge in yet another of my patented football/politics crossover posts, so I'll understand if you want to back out of this one. Like Jon Carroll's cat columns, these posts can be highly idiosyncratic. But I am convinced that a significant percentage of voters have brand identification with their political identity much in the same way they bond with professional sports teams. Democrats versus Republicans; Raiders versus Niners. Obviously the stakes are infinitely higher in politics, but as voters have been disempowered, their cynicism and apathy mitigates much of the magnitude in the comparison.

So yesterday I watched with distaste and frustration my underachieving Oakland Raiders lose to the overrated Denver Broncos, in a game that was both eminently winnable and a do-or-die situation for Oakland. They now find themselves two games back in a very tough division, with only seven games left in the regular season, and only two division games remaining -- both on the road. Let's just say a playoff appearance, yet again, is highly unlikely for the Raiders.

In fact, since their epic 2002 season (and the subsequent epic collapse in that Super Bowl against former coach Jon Gruden), Oakland has amassed a 12-29 win-loss record. This is a precipitious collapse -- from 2000-2002, Oakland had the winningest record in the entire league, and since then, only their partners in futility across the bay have a worse record.

I believe that yesterday's Denver game encapsulates why.

The first problem was the game plan -- or rather, the complete lack of one. Every team prepares for its upcoming game by watching film of their opponents. Denver's last game, two weeks ago, was a clobbering of last year's NFC champions, the Philadelphia Eagles, who are now at the bottom of a very tough division and will probably miss the playoffs for the first time since 1999. Denver used a rather unusual defensive strategy, thwarting Philly QB Donovan McNabb with as many as nine defenders at the line of scrimmage, massive blitzes, and constant rotations of defensive linemen to keep both McNabb and the Eagles' offensive linemen from getting a rhythm established. As a result, McNabb began the game 0-for-12, and Denver easily romped over them.

Now, if I were Oakland's coach, I would keep a couple things in mind. The first is that Philly has no running game, thanks to RB Bryan Westbrook's protracted contract holdout (due, coincidentally enough, to Oakland paying premium dollar to free-agent RB LaMont Jordan. Westbrook used Jordan's signing as a template for his own demands from the the notoriously stingy Eagles organization.). Some of the Eagles' offensive game plans have had as high as a 6:1 pass:run ratio. So Denver set an attacking defense with that in mind.

But Oakland has a fine running game -- indeed, all three of its wins this season were due in large part to making sure Jordan got at least 20 carries per game. This establishes offensive tempo and clock control. Yet Oakland failed to give Jordan the requisite number of carries, no doubt due to their fear of Denver's fifth-ranked run defense (as opposed to its 29th-ranked pass D).

What I can't believe the Raiders didn't even try was a couple of no-huddle offensive drives. You script a dozen or so plays, and dictate the tempo. This throws off most defensive game plans; it would most certainly have kept Denver from being able to rotate its D-linemen in and out at will.

The point is that Oakland did not play to win; rather, they merely played to not lose. There is an important distinction there that good teams recognize, and bad teams ignore.

The most critical problem with Oakland planning its game around a pass-heavy offense has to rest with QB Kerry Collins. Collins has solid range, and a good attitude. He's been in the league for 11 years now for a reason. But his mechanics and fundamentals suck. He overthrows his receivers regularly. He gets "happy feet" and panics at times. He gets at least one or two delay-of-game penalties every game, which is inexcusable even in a rookie.

All of these symptoms point to one major problem -- Collins does not have his shit together. He is not as well-prepared as he should be. He may be studying the playbook and the game films, but it is not translating into results. I believe he is sincere in his contrition for this, but he is not the one paying $80 to watch himself overthrow Randy Moss or Jerry Porter every third play; he is not the one paying to watch yet another three-and-out.

Do I believe that Collins should be yanked, or coach Norv Turner fired? Yes. But I also believe that they have the tools to rectify their respective situations. Collins is sloppy and inconsistent in his fundamentals, and ill-prepared in the heat of a drive. Those are things that can be fixed with careful attention. Turner is providing his team with half a game plan, half the motivation they need, and little or no meaningful adjustments when needed. These things can also be fixed.

The question is whether Collins and Turner have the ability to step outside themselves and see these problems with more perspective, and the will to do what needs to be done to correct the problem. Working on consistency in technique and mechanics, including short outlet passes higher up on the checkdown, having a battery of plays and scripted drives to regain tempo and command of the game -- these are all things than can and must be done to turn things around.

What has really undermined the Raiders, as fans know, is the man at the top, Al Davis. Davis has run the team like his personal fiefdom for four decades now. His immense knowledge of the game and fierce loyalty to favorite players propelled the Raiders into the realm of the truly great teams well into the '80s. Since then, not so much. The mechanics of the game have passed him by, and the increasingly corporate structure of the league is anathema to a barely benevolent dictator like Davis. Bottom line in any company is that a diseased company culture will eventually undermine even the most talented performers.

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For much of the past five years, the Democratic party has exhibited many of the same traits we've observed in a hard-luck team like the Raiders -- it's not that they don't have the talent, it's that they don't have the structure and coordination. They shoot themselves in the foot before they have the chance to get up and run. And for the most part, the Democrats' ideas really are superior to those of the Republicans. The Republicans have made much headway selling the notions of personal responsibility and accountability, when their actions (and let's be honest, their choice for preznit) clearly demonstrate otherwise. If they meant it, it might make a difference. Clearly, they don't mean it, except when it applies to battling their political nemeses.

So why do the Democrats keep losing to a blatantly corrupt gang headed by Fredo Corleone? (This is not an attempt at "snark", it's just a painfully obvious fact -- Bush is a stupid, stupid man, devoid of even the base intelligence required to realize that sometimes you're wrong about shit and you have to have a Plan B handy. Perhaps he's waiting for things to get even worse before unveiling such a backup plan, who knows?) The conventional wisdom holds that the Dems are simply too elite and snobby to get what heartland America wants. This, of course, is pure bullshit, but the problem is that the Dems have let the meme take hold.

I don't think they ever expected to lose the 2000 election. They seemed to think it was a slam-dunk, and were almost offended that the GOP seriously wanted to put up a useless, drooling moron as a serious candidate against a sitting vice-president. So they acted accordingly, and when shit turned south, they had no Plan B. Then along came 9/11, and they were painted into a corner of quasi-patriotic obedience for some time.

But last year was an opportunity for the Democrats to learn the lessons of 2000, and adjust their '04 game plan accordingly. Instead, they danced around the issues, failed to attack anything with any real forcefulness, and looked aghast that the Republicans would put baldfaced lies at the forefront of their late-summer marketing strategy. And even at that point, they failed to make the necessary adjustments to counter such an attack.

In other words, they didn't play to win, they merely played not to lose.

Now conventional wisdom has it that Bush is on the ropes, and in fact that is a correct assessment. Not even a year into its second term, this is a lame-duck administration. Bush is having to limp off to China to make it look like he's doing something, while his second-string SCOTUS nominee is about to get batted around like a plump mouse. If we keep our eyes on the ball, we note that Bush's Asia trip is doomed to failure just as surely as his South America trip was. We are in hock to China up to our eyeballs, and they want more oil just as much as we do. Trade deficits are at record highs and increasing, and the Chinese are stealing every bit of intellectual property that isn't nailed down, even as Sony backdoors individuals' PCs with its bullshit anti-piracy software and insane copyright policies. North Korea still has its nukes, and is probably still working on more, and there isn't a goddamned thing we can do about it.

The Asia trip is being dutifully portrayed as a comeback from the Argentine debacle, but the only realistic outcomes are either Bush coming back with his tail between his legs, or the Chinese docking the tail, before sending his sorry ass back here for a mutinous Congress and a seething citizenry to beat up on him some more.

But the salient point here is that, while the Dems are getting some backbone finally, in preparation for the midterms, the real damage has been done to Bush by his own party members. John McCain and Chuck Hagel have led the charge against this administration's gutless torture policies in a way that none of the Dems seem to have the stones to do.

And that is why the Democrats are going to have to get serious about getting on top of this thing, and not just be content to sit on the sidelines and watch the GOP implosion. The opportunity is there -- come up with a real alt-energy Apollo Project, one that gradually rethinks the exurban lifestyle by starting with the incredible fact that the average American's food travels 1500 miles before it reaches the dinner table, one that penalizes gas-guzzlers and rewards common sense. (Yes, this will initiate the usual protests that it will kill off the oil and auto industries, but it won't. They're too big to fail outright. It will force them to change -- better now than later.) Be the party of reform and honesty, standing in opposition to the party of secrecy and corruption.

The chips are on the table, Democrats. Do you have the balls to step up and play your hand?