As I've remarked on the boards several times this week, I thought Jack got a rough deal from fans last week given the amount of latitude afforded to his predecessors. Granted, last week's opener was a stinker but it wasn't the first one we've seen in the last three years. In fact, strewn among all of the preceding 37 stinkers were record setting defeats such as the most points ever scored against our defense and I don't know how many personal Peyton Manning records.

What I have loved from the beginning about Jack is that being a Raider's coach is personal for him. I can relate to that. No it's not a criteria for being a successful coach and some might argue it's a recipe for disaster but I beg to differ. The last coach we had who made it personal was Hue and he was also the last coach we had who kept us from losing more games than we won. Say what you want about Hue the GM, Hue the coach is one of the few recent Raider individuals to ever grace the sidelines and never lose more games than he won during at least a two year tenure.That harkens back to a time when all Raiders could claim that distnction. BTW, we saw last week how personal Hue could get.

Jack's handprint is all over this win. From Musgrave's miraculously revised game plan (no truth at all to the rumors that we swapped OCs with Philly??) to the improvement in DJ's coverage -yes, DJ was much better in coverage!!! Don't know what half you guys were looking at. The Cooper pick, the addition of 49er ex-divas(??) that would never have survived a pre-Jack Reggie righteousness rating, the absence of any residue of the Cincy game. This is all Jack.

Getting rid of Sio put Jack on the bad side of a lot of people. It should be clear that there was some sort of locker room issue and the most important thing to take out of yesterday's win is that Jack has the locker room. Sio's gone and we have the locker room and the players believe in what we're doing. We won't be dealing with this crap in week 5 or 6 or after the bye. It's done and it's over.

That's why we hire coaches in the first place. We have to trust their judgment and we have to have a basis for trusting that judgment.We know they are going to screw up big time. Let's not kid ourselves. Look at the eggs being laid by respectable coaches this season. Pete Carroll, Tom Coughlan, Sean Payton etc.. What you want to know is: Can you fix it? Are you on track with whatever you're trying to do? What we knew from out previous coaches is that we were never close to telling whether or not we were on track because we were waiting for the bleeding to stop. We're at .500 now. We've beaten a good coach and a good team. Not the same team that won the Super Bowl but then look at what a non-Super Bowl winner did to us last week.