Hello everyone, this is my first post and I hope the first of many. Let me start off by saying that this site is awesome and cannot say enough about how nice it is to have somewhere to interact with other Raiders fans seeing as how there seems to be a total of 10 Raiders fans in the entire state of Indiana, but I digress.

Most people (myself included) were NOT happy when we traded a 1st and 2nd round pick for a jobless Palmer, and I feel this was the general reason why:

• He's getting old
• coming off the couch
• WE NEED 1ST AND 2ND ROUND PICKS

Now these are some good reasons to not be happy about this trade, but rest assured, it could be much, much worse. Let's think for a second of some teams that are worse off in their QB situations:

1. Jets
2. Browns
3. Bills

The Jets are paying Mark Sanchez pretty close to what we are paying Palmer, but Palmer is a much better QB and the Jets would be one of the better teams with Palmer at the helm. Also remember that the Jets traded up to get Sanchez and definitly wound up giving more for him than we gave up for Palmer.

The Browns selected a 28 year old Brandon Weeden with a 1st round pick this year, and he is only 3 years younger than Palmer. Lets compare their stats:

• Palmer: 10 years in the league, 86 QBR, and 27,000 yards passing.
• Weeden: Rookie, 72.3 QBR, and 1700 yards passing.

We have a QB who has more experience by far than Weeden and is only 3 years younger. It sucks to be a Browns fan right now.

In conclusion, I would have rather kept our 1st and 2nd round picks and tried to trade for RG3 this offseason, but in reality, the 'skins would have gotten him anyways. Instead we got a level-headed, committed veteran QB who took a year off and is very healthy. This IS a QB who we can be successful with if we surround him with the right team. If we indeed are trying to restock, then it is still okay to keep Palmer until he retires. Palmer is NOT the problem, and once we have a good all around team, he will be the one to lead us back to where we need to go. Hopefully now it doesnt seem like the worst trade ever like you may have thought before reading this.

RAIDER NATION!