Mark Davis: "Winning the Super Bowl is the only goal"

The one thing Mark Davis has these days that his late father didn't have was time. He has the time to allow the Raiders to build into something and therefore the patience to allow for the possibility of some difficult seasons in the mean time.

Raiders fans look back at the Raiders at one time being the winningest franchise in all of sports and at one time being the kings of Monday Night Football. All that is fine and good but none of it matters to Mark Davis. To him, there's only one thing that matters.

"My philosophy is, making the playoffs is great and all that," Mark Davis told the Bay Area News Group. "It's great for the fans and everything, but winning the Super Bowl is the only goal. Otherwise, I've said it all my life, if you don't win the Super Bowl, then you're just like one of the other 30 teams.

"In my lifetime, we've had three successful seasons. That's the absolute truth. That's the way I live my life. That's the way we live our lives. What we're trying to build is a team that is going to go after Super Bowls. It can't just be a one-shot deal."

The Raiders reached the Super Bowl following the 2001 season but didn't win it. By Mark's standards, that season was a failure and therefore the AFC Championship Trophy that came with it is window dressing.

That ‘one-shot deal" was what his father Al was trying desperately to harness in the last years of his life. He was spending like there was no tomorrow because for him, that could be the case any day. He was unable to reach that elusive goal and in the course of it all, the Raiders had piled up backloaded contracts that forced an immediate rebuild.

"It's something that was necessary," Mark Davis said. "It was clearly evident. We needed to do some more restructuring. All the way down to the brass bolts. But there's light at the end of the tunnel."

At this moment, that light is pretty small. Davis acknowledges that the process doesn't often happen overnight.

"The process of building a foundation is going to take place this year, next year, the following year," Davis said. "It's not just going to be a quick fix, 'OK, hey, we're back and this is great.' It's going to take awhile."

While he is prepared for a long road back, he added; "Who knows? We could be really competitive this year. I'm not writing the season off."

Even still, "competitive" is not a Super Bowl. And by Mark's standards, that's just not good enough.

Follow @LeviDamien