RaiderDamus' Friday Foretelling: Raiders vs. Titans

Greetings, Raider fans! It is I, the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent sage of all sages, RaiderDamus the Great and Powerful. I come to you today hot off another pathetic Raiders loss, and frankly am in no mood to write any of this because I am still angry about the Falcons game. But I have a job to do, and I am nothing if not a fucking professional. If the Raiders are going to have the worst defense since the Maginot Line, then my fellow Raider fans are going to need me to make fun of anything and everything or this is going to be a VERY long season.

While Oakland does have a dreadful defense right now, they also have the best offense in football led by quarterback Derek Carr, whom Pro Football Outsiders ranked this week as the best quarterback in the NFL according to DYAR, which is Defense-Adjusted Yards Over Replacement, meaning how well he did against a defense compared to average defenses. Considering Carr has played the Saints and Falcons defenses, this implies that Derek Carr is so much better than any other quarterback in the NFL that  comparisons are laughable. It's a great thing we're wasting his talent like the Saints are currently doing with Drew Brees.

The very exciting thing to the Great Raiderdamus about the Titans game on Sunday is that I will in fact be in attendance. I don't know if there is a hot chicken stand at Nissan Stadium, but if there is I will find it and I will order all of the things. Perhaps a friendly Titans fan can direct me to where I need to go. Few things in life are finer than fried chicken and beer.

But you didn't come here to read about me. You came here, as you have for the last four years, to hear what the Great Beyond has to say about this game. So as is my custom, I consulted with the Great Old One for his take on this game. The Great Beyond spake, and he sayeth:

"You're back again. After last week I honestly expected you to crawl into the deepest, dankest corner of your cave and cry yourself to death. But I guess as a Raider fan you are accustomed to crushing disappointment and foolish hopes. Well, let's move on. Who do you have this week? The Titans? Again? Holy crap man, haven't the Raiders already played the Titans this year? And haven't you had a Titans game like four out of the last six seasons? This is absurd. The schedule makers need to quit putting these two teams together. This isn't funny anymore.

And you're going to be AT this game? What did you do to deserve that, win the Jackass Lottery? Flying into Nashville this week is like flying into Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. It's best if you turn around as quickly as possible.

The good citizens of Tennessee are going to be an angry nest of hornets this week because on Saturday, the Tennessee Volunteers will play the Florida Gators, and they will lose. Again. Because the Volunteers actually suck. A victory over the shambling, leprous corpse of Virginia Tech at a NASCAR track does not make you a good team. Florida is going to expose Tennessee's horrible offensive line for the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald that it is, and Florida will dominate even without Luke Del Rio at quarterback. So when you are at the game on Sunday, you're going to see lots of depressed people who look like this:

These are your average Titans fans- people who are die-hard Vols fans because they remember when Phil Fulmer was great, but who follow the Titans because they exist. They are akin to people who really love the coffee shop several miles away, but will visit the one that just opened up because it's a block from their house.

There are also some non-average Titans fans, people with such severe mental illness that they actually get excited about a team so boring that their fans wish Jeff Fisher were the coach again. Here are some of them.

First, there's this guy.

and also this man.

and also this gentleman here.

The interesting thing about the first man is that his hair is not a costume, and he has not gone Super Saiyan. That is his real hair, by virtue of the fact that he has commiserated with coeds from Vanderbilt University and his gonorrhea is so severe that it has reached the top of his head.

While the Titans are as bland, forgettable and generic a franchise as exists in this country (the design team that came up with their color scheme actually had the balls to recommend light blue on dark blue. which is a pale imitation of Raiderdamus' Pop Warner football uniform), we can say this for them: Without the Tennesee Titans, the Raiders would not employ Derek Carr.

Follow me on this. After several decades of loyally supporting the Oilers, Houston was deprived of their team by indefensible shitheel owner Bud Adams, pictured here:

Now in Adams' defense, Houston is a terrible place

full of people who have given up on life to the extent that they intentionally live in Texas. I wouldn't want to live there either.

So Adams moved to Tennessee, mistakenly believing that people who are so passionate about college football that they row actual boats to get to a Volunteers game would support his loser franchise that played on a concrete floor in the Astrodome and never won anything. Instead, nobody cares about the Titans and the Titans Flamehead fan website is still advertising tailgate parties from 2004.

Unwilling to build a new stadium for the lame-ass Oilers, Houston was perfectly willing to build a state of the art stadium for an expansion team, the Texans who would be several degrees worse than the Oilers and are just now becoming a decent team. They did this fourteen years ago.

The Texans' first pick was Fresno State QB David Carr, whom they promptly murdered and then sold his corpse to the New York Giants for cash considerations and an order of nachos to be named later. Several years later, David Carr's younger brother Derek Carr was eligible to be drafted following a stellar collegiate career also at Fresno State.

The Texans could have drafted Derek Carr. They did not. The Titans could have drafted Derek Carr. They did not. The Browns could have drafted Derek Carr. They did not. Why? Because his name was Carr. The Texans, who only came into existence because of the Titans, had ruined David Carr to such an extent that EVERY TEAM passed on his younger brother in the first round, and some into the second round, just assuming the stink of Texans had been passed on to what at the time had been a twelve year old boy. If Derek Carr was named Derek Jones, or Derek Burgermeister, or Derek McGillicutty, he would have been taken in the top ten.

The Titans have uncharacteristically drafted with a modicum of intelligence for the last few seasons, and have taken offensive studs such as the great Marcus Mariota, Derrick Henry and Jack Conklin. They have exactly one good defensive player in Jurell Casey, and have apparently elected to go the Raiders route of all offense and no defense. Unlike the Raiders, the Titans forgot to employ any receivers. Here's a look at who Mariota will be throwing to on Sunday:

The titans franchise has a long and storied history of wasting the careers of great running backs. From Earl Campbell to Eddie George to Chris Johnson, the Titans/Oilers have run these men into the ground for no reward, to say nothing of their total misuse of LenDale White, who is better known as the Marty Jannetty of the 2005 USC backfield.

The problem for the Titans is that the Raiders have the number one offense and they do not. The only time Tennessee is going to be number one is when the next list of Most Obese States is released by the US Bureau of Public Health. The Titans will get a chance to be number one next year, when by if some miracle they are not drafting number one overall again, they will trade up to number one to draft Derek Barnett in a blatant attempt to draw fans to their games,

There is so much wrong with the Titans that I have gotten this far without even mentioning their coach, Mike Mularkey, who sounds like the lead detective on a CBS crime procedural where his chief skill is gazing into the camera with a serious look because is a no-nonsense kind of guy. In real life, Mularkey is the kind of guy who was fired by the Jaguars after one season and has a career record far worse than Jeff Fisher, which frankly is a difficult feat to achieve given the minimum number of games you need to coach to qualify for the title.

The Titans hired Mularkey out of sheer desperation to be their interim head coach last year after canning Ken Whisenhunt and then REHIRED him after the season to be their actual factual head coach. Really, Titans? You couldn't get Rich Kotite, Dennis Allen or Joe Bugel to return your calls?

Much like the rest of Tennessee, the Titans can't do anything right. The best thing that ever came out of Tennessee, Jack Daniels Old No. 7 Tennessee Whiskey, is manufactured in a dry county. You legally cannot buy it there. This is some leftover fuckery from Prohibition, which reminds us that Tennessee as a concept should be prohibited.

For the college football game a few weeks ago at Bristol Motor Speedway, the speedway had purchased nearly half a million beers for the fans in attendance, who numbered well over 150,000.

This amount of beer was not enough by an order of magnitude, because each one of the local grade-school children in attendance can drink three of four beers during any given football game. Leave it to the NASCAR guys who always turn left not to get it right.

However, for this game I don't anticipate the Raiders will be able to cure their defensive woes enough to stop the Titans' rushing attack or limit the big plays that Mariota can spring on defenses. The Titans will come out on top, because that's the only position that's legal in Tennessee.

Titans win, 28-27."