Greetings, Raider fans! It is I, RaiderDamus, your hero, the potentate of predictions, the archduke of anticipation, the prince of portents, and the tower of power too sweet to be sour. Once again I emerge from my cave, deep within the very bowels of the earth to bestow upon you the fate which the Great Beyond has revealed to me about the Raiders game this Sunday.
I have to be frank here. I like the Jaguars. I lived in Jacksonville in the early 90's when they were miraculously awarded the team. Unfortunately I moved before the team actually began play, but not before my family accumulated a good deal of Jaguars merchandise. In the South, they have priorities. Those priorities, in order, are God, college football, pro football, and spring practice for college football. In the 1960's, Bear Bryant and God were interchangeable.
The Jaguars used to be good. In fact, they used to be great. With Mark Brunell under center and Tom Coughlin roaming the sidelines, there were few teams who could hang with them. Jimmy Smith and Keenan McCardell are one of the finest receiver tandems of the last twenty years. Fred Taylor had an extended run of success and thousand yard seasons.
But that was years ago. The Jaguars have had a few missed first round draft picks, taking the likes of R. Jay Soward, Reggie Williams, Matt Jones and Blaine Gabbert, who is a turd.They did take the DT tandem of John Henderson and Marcus Stroud in consecutive years in 2001 and 2002, but the beginning of the franchise was out of necessity built upon star players being drafted like Tony Boselli, Kevin Hardy, Taylor, and Fernando Bryant.
The last two years they've taken a couple great players I like a lot in Luke Joeckel and Justin Blackmon. They will lead Jacksonville to, if not greatness, at least good-ness someday. But Sunday is not that day.
The Jaguars are a train wreck. They are assembled about as reasonably as an Escher painting. For Jack Del Rio to be fired as head coach and hired as Denver's defensive coordinator was an upward move on his part. They scored TWO points against the Chefs. The offense did not score at all. The game was played in Jacksonville, in front of all the Jaguar fans. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, if that is how the Jaguars treat their fans, they don't deserve to have any. Luckily, they don't have too many. This is because they passed on Tim Tebow to pick Tyson Alualu, a defensive tackle who this year is being moved to end. Had the Jags picked Tebow, not only would their stadium be full every week, but we would all have been spared the insufferability of Tebow's time with the Broncos.
The message from the Great Beyond this week did not, in fact, come in the form it usually does. It came in the form of a wreath laid at the doorstep of my cave with a note written upon it which read, "Congratulations. This one's free." It went on to say that this was the easiest game the Raiders will have all year, they are going to dismantle the Jaguars, and should anything happen to alter this particular outcome, the apocalypse was surely on its way. And then I'd have a wreath, which is nice, so at least I have that going for me.
Raiders win, 26-9.
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