Davis must know Cable has to go

No one any good wants job

By Tim Kawakami
San Jose Mercury News

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If you're Al Davis (yikes!), what do you do?

His team is 2-6, at another dead end. He is still employing — as of last check — Tom Cable, the ultimate dead-ender coach.

Davis has to be embarrassed by the recent reports about Cable's alleged history of violence against women. Al is justifiably proud about his public and private stances against such behavior. Surely he is readying a case to fire Cable "for cause." He knows that his franchise, even as low as it has sunk, will be better off without this baggage.

But Al also knows that Cable will be his second coach fired "for cause" in 14 months, after the Raiders sliced Lane Kiffin in September of last year. The Kiffin grievance/ arbitration process is still on-going, by the way.

Going to arbitration vs. two coaches in 14 months ... well, that's not the most stable way to run a franchise, even if Al can win both cases.

Because proving "cause" isn't good, either, since Al is the guy who hired Kiffin and Cable in the first place.

Clearly, the Raiders have produced bad football recently, but the team's background-checking is even worse.

Or maybe Al just favors firing coaches when he thinks he doesn't have to pay them. Or he doesn't quite know what he's doing any more and gets mad a lot.

Probably: All of the above.

If Al continues to hesitate on the decision to fire Cable during this bye week, Al is telling us that he can't pull the trigger on a coach accused of multiple instances of violence, at least two toward women.

That's not very chivalrous.

But if Al does fire Cable this week, Davis will be making his sixth coaching change since the end of 2003, resulting in zero tangible success so far.

It's bad when the Norv Turner era seems like the good old days.

Even worse, another firing would force Al to go through another tiring, potentially humiliating coaching search come January.

He knows nobody good wants this job. He just doesn't want to have to admit it again.

Yep, a dead end. Al probably figured out weeks ago that Cable is not the man he wants representing the Raiders, nor is he the coach to revive the Raiders offense.

Cable is, after all, precisely what he was last February: A dead-end option for a dead-end team that has no true options, except to keep running into dead ends.

Maybe Al is finally realizing he has done this to himself. If nobody credible wants to coach the Raiders, the job will be filled by men like Cable. So what does Al do? He can promise himself to handle this situation better than he has the others.

He has to judiciously weigh these three key things:

1. Can the Raiders proceed one more day with a coach who is constantly and amazingly even more controversial than Al?

2. What's best for JaMarcus Russell?

3. What's the plan after this season?

Whenever Al makes the move on Cable, it's likely that Paul Hackett or Ted Tollner will fill in on an interim basis.

Then, after the season, maybe Al will turn to last spring's second-place finisher Kevin Gilbride or to Jim Fassel, who desperately wants the job.

Maybe Al will take a stronger run at Jim Harbaugh than Al was ready to make last spring, though Harbaugh should have much better options this time.

Would $4 million a year — far more than Davis has ever paid a coach — pique Harbaugh's interest in fixing Russell? Worth a discussion for Al, I'm sure.

He has to do something. He cannot accept what the Raiders are now, and how low they have sunk with Cable.

Cable is no better than the Raiders. The Raiders are no better than him. That's a sad thing to say. For both sides.