Raiders fire Kiffin, Davis blows him up in the media

The other shoe finally dropped for Oakland Raiders’ head coach Lane Kiffin on Tuesday as his tempestuous tenure with the team came to an end.  In a tersely worded statement released by the team, it was announced that “Lane Kiffin has been released as head coach of the Oakland Raiders for cause.”  Kiffin was fired via telephone and without pay, which further underscores just how little the franchise thought of him and his performance.

Kiffin was in essence a “walking dead man”, as he was informed by someone within the Raider hierarchy that he would be given the boot following the team’s 24-23 loss at Buffalo in week 3.  Al Davis took his time to drop the blade after Kiffin’s head was on the chopping block, waiting until the team’s bye week.  The Raiders were 1-3 this season at the time of his dismissal, with two losses resulting from blown 4th quarter leads.  That was a familiar refrain during the Kiffin era—the team blew 4th quarter leads 11 times en route to losses.  With the Raiders’ record under Kiffin 5-15 those 11 blown leads are clearly a big deal.

According to Al Davis, however, the Raiders didn’t fire Kiffin for poor performance.  In a rambling, sometimes borderline incoherent press conference the 79 year old team President pulled no punches in his assessment of Kiffin, calling him alternately a “disgrace” and a liar.  Davis also accused Kiffin of trying to force the team to fire him so they’d have to pay him off.  If the NFL upholds the Raiders’ claim that the coach was “fired for cause” they won’t have to pay him a cent.  Davis’s KO punch was the simple admission that “he picked the wrong guy”:

"I reached a point where I felt that the whole staff were fractionalized, that the best thing to do to get this thing back was to make a change. It hurts because I picked the guy. I picked the wrong guy."

Davis also indicated that there wasn’t a specific thing that led to his assessment that Kiffin “disgraced the organization” but rather a pattern of behavior:

"I don't think it was any one thing, It was a cumulative thing. I think the pattern just disturbed me."

Kiffin didn’t immediately refute any of the specific claims of the longtime Raiders’ bossman, but suggested that it was only “one side of the story”.  He reportedly going to counterpunch in his own press conference scheduled for Wednesday.  Despite the acrimonious end to his tenure as head coach, Kiffin chalked it up as a learning experience and tried to pass the onus for the messy situation onto Davis:

"It was something I wasn't proud of to be associated with and I was embarrassed for him, to tell you the truth.”

While the soap opera will rage on for awhile, the Raiders’ have to get back to business of playing football immediately.  After taking a break either to compose himself and/or to heighten the dramatic tension, Davis returned and informed the media that longtime offensive line coach Tom Cable would assume the duties as interim head coach.