Raiders continue to dump bad debt; cut Harris, Griffiths
A year ago, Oakland shocked a ton of folks around the league by shelling out ridiculous amounts of cash to a group of malcontent, injury-prone players who clearly have talent, but for one reason or another, have not been able to get it together on the field.
Fast forward back to the present and instead of reaping the reward of solid foresight, the Raiders are now lamenting the truckloads of cash dumped into the laps of CB DeAngelo Hall, WR Javon Walker, S Gibril Wilson, and OT Kwame Harris, after all four have been released from the team without any justification for their swollen bank accounts.
Toss in FB Justin Griffith and you’ve got a venerable who’s who of players most teams try to avoid signing to record breaking contracts. But apparently, the Raiders could care less about the massive streams of money exiting the Bay Area and instead of pushing their underachieving group of high-priced waterboys to take their game to new heights, Oakland would rather cut each and every one of them instead.
Granted, this is an Al Davis led team that we’re talking about so some handicap must be given, but even with Grandpa Depends still calling the shots in the board room, you would think some measure of financial prudence would take charge in a city otherwise suffering from the meltdown in our nation’s economy.
But no so for the Raiders, who chose to reward the best cover corner (Nnamdi Asomugha) in the league with a deal that is so absurd, no contract in the future of the league will ever be it’s equal… at least not at the cornerback position that is. No one is disputing that Asomugha deserved a major contract instead of the yearly franchise bitch slap he was accustomed to receiving, but to dole out close to $16 million a season for a cornerback is asinine at best, especially when teams can simply load up on young talent at the position in the upcoming draft.
Then again, this is pretty much par for the course when it comes to an he Davis led franchise, as he is always ready and willing to provide the rest of the league an outstanding amount of fodder in the form of bloated contracts and idiotic coaching changes in mid stream.
If the Raiders are to ever regain even a smidgen of league wide respect once more, they will have to stop stabbing fellow teams in the back and learn to follow the examples set by past champions. Recently they understood this all too well, and made an ill-fated trip to the Super Bowl as a result, but once lost, the team could no longer seem to find its way amongst the forest, despite being able to clearly see the castle right in front of them.
That’s why this season will be do or die for a Raiders squad that showed a lot of promise late last season. If they can somehow patch together this rag tag group every week, the decisions made this off-season will be widely praised, and rightfully so.
If not… well, you get the picture.
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