Warren Sapp comes to Kiffin's defense, blows up Raider Honcho Davis

Still no public rebuttal from deposed Oakland Raiders’ head coach Lane Kiffin after he was not only fired earlier this week but thrown under the bus by Al Davis. Davis called him every name in the book, including a “disgrace to the Raiders” and a “liar” in a rambling press conference. While Kiffin has been so far silent, he’s got some unlikely allies coming to his defense such as former Raider Warren Sapp who spoke out publicly about the mess on Thursday.

Sapp spoke about his tenure with the team on Showtime’s “Inside the NFL” TV show and was as virulent in defense of Kiffin as he wrote off the Raiders’ organization as a train wreck. First his take on the Raiders:

"Nobody tells you how bad it is... any person that calls me on the telephone, [I tell them] do not go anywhere near Oakland."

Sapp went on to explain that this untenable situation was not caused by Kiffin, and that his goal—and perhaps his undoing in Oakland—was a desire to clean up the mess:

"He came in there with a change of mentality. The whole system. He changed how the locker room looked because it was going to take that kind of overhaul for Oakland to become the proud franchise we all knew it was."

He then went on to place the blame squarely on Al Davis, calling him meddlesome and behind the times to the point of almost making him sound senile:

"[Davis] is the common equation. You take him out, put him at home watching film or whatever he is doing -- you have a functioning football organization. But once he comes over the top, he goes and starts moving it around.”

"Al Davis knows football -- it's just '60s and '70s football. That's what it is. He's thinking that Cliff Branch is outside and [Jim] Plunkett is dropping back and you can throw it 80 yards down the field -- deep ball, deep ball, deep ball."

According to Sapp, Davis would call in plays during games:

"I remember the first two weeks I was there, we played a preseason game. Somebody came up one time and said, 'We're going deep right here, dog.' I said, how do you know? He said, 'The phone just rang.'

His conclusion—there’s nothing wrong with the organization that getting rid of Davis won’t help fix:

"All the preparation that goes into a week of work is there, the practicing that you have to put in order to do these things, sometimes [Al Davis] messed with that part of it and that's what kills you.”

No response yet from the Raider organization addressing Sapp’s comments.