For one week, at least, Raiders don't reside in Loserville

OAKLAND

Certain things the Raiders did not prove Sunday.

They did not prove they're a good team. No way. They beat a talent-challenged bunch from Cleveland, and they had to hold their breath at the end as the Browns loused up an easy field goal which would have won the game. They allowed the Browns' offense to march right down the field with almost no time left, and they made an entire stadium sweat and pray and mutter before it could exhale with relief.

So, no, the Raiders certainly did not prove they're a good team.

They did not prove who their quarterback should be. You'd think after three games the Raiders would have anointed a quarterback, but Josh McCown, who got hurt and left the field, and Daunte Culpepper, who replaced him, played about the same.

They made good passes and they

made crummy passes and it is clear, for now anyway, the Oakland quarterback

is a caretaker. He guards the ball and

hands off to the running back and, in general, resembles a human turnstile.

But aside from not proving some things on Sunday, the Raiders proved the most important thing of all. They proved they can win a game. I repeat. The Oakland Raiders can, and did, win. Tommy Kelly blocked the potential winning field goal and afterward coach Lane Kiffin, in a voice filled with wonder and awe, said, "And there it was. It was the last play. And Tommy blocked it."

It was a momentous achievement what Kelly did -- what the Raiders did -- because let's face it: Fair-minded people across the land thought they never would win again, not in recorded time.

Losing had become a state of mind for the Raiders. It was worse than that. Losing had become a way of life.

It was like the Raiders lived in a rundown part of town called Loserville and it was gray and rainy there and bad things always happened.

The loser Raiders could lose close games and they could lose blowouts. They were equal opportunity losers, general losers. They had lost 11 in a row before beating the Browns and 11 consecutive losses is the better part of a season.

Losing that many consecutive games kills the soul of a team. Until this season, the Raiders had a dead soul.

Last week, they almost defeated the Broncos in Denver -- almost got out of Loserville. But Denver coach Mike Shanahan called time out just as Sebastian Janikowski kicked what appeared to be the winning field goal, and when Janikowski had to repeat the good kick, he couldn't. And the Raiders lost.

They lost because it is in the nature of losers to lose. It is how they fulfill their destiny.

But, and here comes the poetic part, they had experienced five seconds when they felt like winners -- the five seconds before they learned Janikowski had to try a do-over kick.

Kiffin told his players to remember the five-second feeling.

All week leading up to the Browns game, he mentioned the feeling and told them to hold onto it and groove on it and love it and, most of all, reproduce it -- do the necessary things to recapture that feeling.

He told them to become winners, for God's sake.

And they did. For the upcoming week -- for this one week -- the Raiders are winners. It's wonderful in a change-of-pace kind of way, the sad sack turning into a hero.

There's something praiseworthy about how they won. They defeated the Browns by running the ball -- choose your anatomical metaphor here -- down their throats, up their gut, into their teeth. You get the idea.

The Raiders ran way more than they passed and that means, when things matter, they don't claim to be brilliant or fancy or clever. They claim to be tough. They are hard. They punish you. They make you suffer because, at its core, football is a game of hit and be hit. And sometimes -- most of the time -- the harder hitter wins.

"I was tired, I won't lie about that," offensive lineman Robert Gallery said after he had blocked for running back LaMont Jordan about a million times. "But no, that's fun -- grind somebody into the ground."

By the end, the Browns were ground beef, a bunch of hamburgers. For Kiffin, running isn't merely a game plan. It's a philosophy of life.

"The makeup of our team pushes us toward running the ball, especially in the second half," he said. "As the defense tires, the cuts get easier."

Kiffin paused. His eyes grew dreamy as if he'd glimpsed a vision of beauty.

"OK, now it's time for the quarterbacks to hand it off," he said.

And they did. They handed it off, mostly to Jordan, who resembled a human bowling ball, knocking over defenders.

"It's totally different, 41 running plays today," he said, taking a shot at last year's ridiculous offensive plan. "This offense is built around the running game."

It sure is. It's not a great offense. In the long run, it may not even be a good offense. But that hardly matters because, when you get down to it, a win is a win is a win.

You can reach Staff Columnist Lowell Cohn at 521-5486 or lowell.cohn@pressdemocrat.com.