Silver And Black Pride
Raise your hand if you remember the Art Shell-led 2006 Oakland Raiders.
If your hand was shaking at the awful memory, I don’t blame you.
That team featured Art Shell’s return to the coaching game after a 12-season hiatus — the 60-year-old last coached the Raiders back in 1994 — and then-owner Al Davis’ decision for Shell Game The Sequel was quite disastrous. Not only did Raider Nation get Shell 2.0, the coach brought back his old offensive coordinator Tom Walsh. Like the head coach, the play caller had a 12-year gap between the last time he coached the Silver & Black and operated a bed & breakfast during his time away from the coaching game.
Hence, the “Bed & Breakfast” offense moniker, and oh boy, did that label stick — hard.
Shell, Walsh, and the coaching staff steered the Raiders aground to a 2-14 overall record with the 32nd-ranked offense that scored a total of 168 points and 10.5 points per game average. The defense ended 18th allowing 332 points and an average of 20.8 points per game. Shell replaced Walsh with John Shoop (currently the head coach for the Nordic Storm of the European League of Football) in-season.
Why bring this all up?
The Pete Carroll 2025 Raiders are reminiscent of that awful 2006 squad. Both variants of the Silver & Black share the flat-lined offense and middling/lower echelon defense as characteristics.
At 2-8 overall, the current rendition of the Silver & Black are ranked 30th offensively with 155 total points and an average of 15.5 points per contest. Defensively, the team is 24th allowing a total of 253 points and an average of 25.3 points per contest through 10 games so far.
But unlike their counterparts in Shell and Walsh, Carroll (the oldest head coach in league history at 74 years old) and Kelly didn’t have a dozen year gap between coaching stints. And this makes the Raiders performance thus far much worse. We can rail on the Raiders’ lack of talent, but we can’t ignore coaching as an issue, too.
Despite having Shell and the accomplished Jackie Slater and Irv Eatman as co-offensive line coaches, the 2006 Raiders offensive line was atrocious. Combine that with Walsh’s antiquated concepts and play calling, the results were unsurprisingly unbearable. Through 11 games that year, the team scored a league-low 132 points and allowed a league-high 53 sacks.
Aaron Brooks, who initially served as the starting quarterback, was running for his life as soon as he got the snap and was sacked 26 times in the eight games he played. He also finished with three touchdowns to eight interceptions before Andrew Walter took over. And, oh man, cement shoes Walter didn’t fare any better getting sacked 46 times (the Raiders finished the year allowing 72 total sacks) while throwing three touchdowns and a whopping 13 interceptions.
In comparison, current Raiders starting quarterback Geno Smith absorbed 31 sack so far while tossing 12 touchdowns to a league-high (tie)...
