Bay Area radio host lays into Reggie McKenzie, calls for him to be fired

Monday, I caught a bit of the always entertaining Damon Bruce show on Bay Area radio station, 95.7 The Game. It was the day after the Raiders lost what was seen as perhaps their last winnable game of the season in Cleveland against the Browns. It dropped the Raiders to 0-7, continuing their worst start to a season in 52 years.

Naturally, the day after such a loss, the wounds are fresh. And Bruce was in rare form in response to some frustrated callers concerned about the direction of the Raiders.

"There is no saving this," said Bruce. "This is not a building that needs a restoration project. . . I've never seen a group of more easily replaceable NFL nobodies than at least 18 of the Raiders' starting 22."

He noted exceptions Derek Carr, Khalil Mack, James Jones, and Donald Penn as the starters and added T.J. Carrie as well, saying "everyone else is replaceable."

Bruce made it clear Tony Sparano is in no way to blame for this. Sparano took over an 0-4 team that has continued to lose over his three games as interim head coach. "You wanna talk about caught up in an unwinnable circumstance. This is not Sparano's fault."

That's when he took his diatribe to another level - directed at the man who put these "replaceable" players together in this "unwinnable circumstance."

"I wouldn't let Reggie McKenzie PARK HIS CAR at the coliseum, much less come in and make another decision," Bruce said emphatically. "It would already be ‘Thanks for the memories. We're not going to fire you publically, but you really don't need to show up here anymore.' If Mark Davis even lets Reggie McKenzie sniff a decision, that's ridiculous."

"You don't need to own a really nice sports car to watch somebody driving a sports car the wrong way and just going ‘oh my God, just give me the keys, just get the Hell off the road with your... you're not supposed to be driving this kind of car like that.' It's like watching a bifocaled, 85-year-old grandmotherly type driving a Porche Boxter. It's like that's not for her, what's going on here. And the Raiders... it's like you need to save them from themselves almost.

"Football fans care about history. If you care about football history, you care about the Oakland Raiders. You might not root for them, but you have to care about them. This is an important franchise that has been rendered Jacksonville Jaguarian over the last two decades. You are a Jaguarian franchise. Oh, pardon me, THEY have a win. They've got a win. And they've got a scoreboard in their stadium that isn't like an orange Lite Brite. You know why there's so many bulbs out at the coliseum stadium? Because they don't make bulbs for those scoreboards anymore. It's completely obsolete. It's like needing head cleaners for a Betamax [video cassette] player. They don't make those anymore."

Hard to imagine that being better articulated than that.

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