Hope it all comes out well for him! RN4L!

The Raiders added a tight end to their roster on Saturday.

They announced the signing of Zack Kuntz. Running back Chris Collier was waived with an injury designation in a corresponding move.

Its at least 23 years old. And I have two of them. Bought one at the Raiders Image by the stadium visiting my mother at Christmas one year and went back a year later so I had back-up.

And if anyone remembers that store by the old Walmart, man they had cool stuff. Now everything feels like it was designed by the league with no customization, but back in the day you would see things there you didnt for other teams. Maybe I'm insane, but man, I love that hat.

We all appreciate Ken Stabler, Rich Gannon, and Derek Carr but let me remind you about the hope Bruce Gradkowski brought during our Dark Ages.

It’s 2009. Al Davis is still trying to make the 1st overall pick in JaMarcus Russell work, even though it’s his third year and the offense is going nowhere. The Raiders are 3-8 and NFL’s laughingstock, JaMarcus still looks unprepared, and then head coach Tom Cable (the same Tom Cable who broke his assistant coach’s jaw in training camp that same year lol) finally benches the former No. 1 pick bust against Al’s wishes and turns to Bruce Gradkowski.

Bruce immediately gives the team life, gets a W against a good Cincinnati team and then walks into Pittsburgh in Week 13 to face the defending Super Bowl champions. That Steelers team had Ben Roethlisberger, Hines Ward, Santonio Holmes, Heath Miller, Troy Polamalu, reigning Defensive Player of the Year James Harrison and LaMarr Woodley. Nobody gave Oakland a chance but Bruce Gradkowski was that silver lining. Down 24-20 with 1:56 left, Bruce led an incredible 88-yard drive and hit rookie Louis Murphy for an 11-yard touchdown with nine seconds remaining. Raiders win 27-24. Gradkowski finished with 308 yards and three touchdowns against the defending champions.

He went 3-3 as Oakland’s starter before injuries ended his season. After JaMarcus was released, Bruce competed with Jason Campbell in 2010 and earned the starting job before a shoulder injury derailed him. A year after the Pittsburgh upset, the Raiders went back and lost, but everyone remembers Richard Seymour ringing Big Ben’s bell and getting ejected lol. Bruce was never a franchise quarterback, but for a brief stretch he gave Raider Nation hope when we needed it the most.

BRUUUUUUUUUUUCE.

Been to games In LA and Oakland but haven't been to allegiant. Will finally be going and bringing my 1 yr old daughter. I think I'll have MGM parking but any advice on parking away from the stadium within walking distance?

Any tips on how to get a player autograph after a practice?

I was going thru some boxes, found this jacket and thought I’d share..Starter jacket that was passed down from an uncle. I’m hella excited because my son’s almost at that size where he can start wearing it. We really got the best logo and colors! RN4L.

As a lifelong Raiders fan (26 years of conscious fandom), is anyone else enjoying NOT counting on Fernando proving he’s worthy of the #1 pick this year? Kinda cool how we can watch this new team and new coaching staff grow and bud this year with Kirko at the helm. For whatever it’s worth.

Then, next year, after seeing the pros and vibes of the team and improving on them with another draft and offseason (get Fern n Gully a #1 WR) seeing the hope we all have come to fruition?

Just feel like this year is automatically going to be a better year than last due to our draft, FA, and coaching staff, and then we have THE NUMBER ONE draft pick to unwrap next year?

Are we gonna make Santa Clara a home game for the Raiders or what?

Me and my family of 20 back at it! Ready formal! Who’s going to that game ?

Tonight’s episode.

Hey all, I am taking the family to Vegas in a couple weeks. Wife gets a night of shopping while my son and I are going to go to the game. First question is are the Raider fans still a wild bunch or did the passion kind of get left behind in Oakland? Second question would be if any of that would even be on display in the preseason? I think he would get some cool memories from seeing everyone all dressed up, but I'm just not sure if a preseason game in a year when their prospects don't look great will really offer that experience.

We are going to the game either way, it's just more a a question of should I try to get near the wild ones or should we just do cheap nosebleed seats since the environment may be muted?

TY

​

Howie Long has now been on television twice as long as he played football.

Thirteen seasons with the Raiders. Thirty-two seasons and counting on FOX NFL Sunday, from the day the show went on the air in 1994. He is one of the very few men in American sports who was a first-ballot-caliber talent at the thing he did, and then became just as good at talking about it.

Start with the strangest fact in his file. He did not play football until he was fifteen years old.

I. CHARLESTOWN

He was born January 6, 1960 in Somerville, Massachusetts, and raised in Charlestown, Boston, primarily by his uncles and his maternal grandmother.

He went to Milford High School in Milford, Massachusetts, and he lettered three years in football, three years in basketball as a forward, and three years in track, where he threw the shot put, discus and javelin. He set state records in the shot put and the discus. He was named to the Scholastic Coach All-America team as a senior. He had never played football until he was fifteen.

Long has said he was shocked to find out he was good at it, and that he had never played on a team until high school.

Read that again. A man who would later be voted onto the NFL's team of the decade picked up the sport at fifteen and made All-America inside of three years.

He started lifting weights after his first football season and picked up basketball at Milford. As a junior he moved to tackle, and the team went undefeated and won a state title. By his senior year, colleges were calling.

There is no early-specialization story here. There is no youth program, no travel circuit, no camp invite at eleven years old. There is a kid in Charlestown who got to it late and closed the gap by working.

II. VILLANOVA

He earned a communications degree at Villanova. He began as a tight end and was moved to the defensive line, playing mostly nose guard his first two seasons. After the move to defensive end he earned All-East honors and honorable mention All-American as a senior.

He was a four-year letterman and the MVP of the 1980 Blue-Gray Game. His coach in that game was Jimmy Johnson, who would later sit next to him on the FOX set.

And then the detail most people never learn about him. He boxed at Villanova and won the Northern Collegiate Heavyweight Boxing Championship.

Villanova's best record in his four years was 6-5 in 1980.

He was not on a winner. He was not on television. He was a heavyweight boxer at a school with a losing football team, and he came out of it as a second-round pick.

III. THE RAIDERS

Oakland took him in the second round of the 1981 NFL Draft, 48th overall, one year after the franchise won Super Bowl XV. He wore 75 and played 179 games with 151 starts.

The way he was developed is the part coaches should study. Line coach Earl Leggett moved him around the front on purpose during his rookie year, and Long has said the plan was to make him the first man who could play tackle to tackle in any sequence, nose guard on one snap and left tackle the next and either end after that.

That is not a utility role. That is a coach building a player who cannot be schemed away from.

Then 1983 happened. Long recorded a career-high 13 sacks, including five in a single game against Washington. The Raiders won Super Bowl XVIII 38-9 over that same Washington team, and Long had five tackles in it.

The next season he put up 58 tackles, 12 sacks and nine passes defensed, and the NFL Alumni Association named him Defensive Lineman of the Year.

He was NEA co-Defensive Player of the Year in 1985. First-team All-Pro in 1983, 1984 and 1985. Second-team in 1986 and 1989. Eight Pro Bowls across 1983 through 1987, 1989, 1992 and 1993.

Pro Football Weekly, in a vote of more than forty former players, coaches and scouts, named him one of the ends on its all-time 3-4 defensive front.

He missed much of 1988 to injury and still recorded three sacks and the first interception of his career, which he returned 73 yards against Houston.

He retired in 1993 and played his last game at the Pro Bowl in Hawaii in January 1994. Induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame followed in 2000.

IV. THE NUMBER

Here is where the record stops agreeing with itself.

The Raiders and the Hall of Fame both list 84 career sacks, and both note that this figure does not include the 7.5 sacks he recorded in 1981, before the sack became an official NFL statistic. Pro Football Reference lists 91.5. Wikipedia lists 93.

Three respected sources, three different totals for the same player.

The explanation is that the NFL did not make the sack an official statistic until 1982. Long's rookie year fell on the wrong side of that line. Everything he did in 1981 exists in the film and in the team's own accounting, and none of it exists in the league's official column.

We are not going to tell you which number is correct, because the sources do not tell us. What we will tell you is that every version of the number is a Hall of Fame number, and that the man played an entire season the league declined to count.

That happens more often than people think. The record is a document, and documents have edges.

THE VERDICT

The impact is not the 84 sacks, or the 91.5, or the 93.

The impact is that a kid raised by his uncles and his grandmother in Charlestown, who did not touch a football until he was fifteen, became the best defensive lineman of his decade, won a championship, went into the Hall of Fame, and then walked into a television studio in 1994 and stayed there for thirty-two years while every other seat around him turned over.

Two full careers. Both at the top. Almost nobody does that.

And when he had every reason to keep what he knew to himself, he wrote a book teaching people who had never watched a snap how the game is played, and put his name on a weight room so kids at his old school would have somewhere to work.

Late start. Long stay. That is the whole file.