Picking Favorites: Why the 2002 Oakland Raiders are NOT My All-Time Team

Davis did two things when he inked Rice: signed the greatest 49er of all time, and stuck a giant dagger in Tim Brown's heart. The message sent to Brown was simple: "you're getting older, your skills are diminishing, we need you to take a step back...and our new No. 1 receiver is four years older than you."

Brown may have taken this in stride, but the football gods did not. Rice was not a Raider, he was a legend in search of a ring to spite his former team. Brown watched Jerry Rice catch seven touchdowns to his two, and gain 1,211 yards to his 930, all in a shiny silver and black uniform, all in front of the only fan base he'd ever known.

Suddenly the Black Hole was in love with Jerry Rice. All this was magnified by Tim Brown's 1,000th catch, which set up a third-and-long. The next play? A touchdown pass to Jerry Rice.

This was wrong...terrible.. ridiculous...it was "Karl-Malone-to-the-Lakers" before "Karl-Malone-to-the-Lakers" was "Karl-Malone-to-the-Lakers." No matter how good it makes your team, the gods of your sport won't let it end in a championship. They let Clemens-to-the-Yankees slide, and regret it to this day.

Rice could not hoist a trophy in silver and black. He couldn't make the 49ers look dumb for picking a young athletic speedster with an insane vertical leap over a 40-year-old man. Michael Jordan was averaging 20-6 with the Washington Wizards...young athletes didn't need Jerry Rice making them look bad too.

The whole thing played out like two formerly successful people (Rice and Davis) jarring their souls in Satan's fridge and saying "if we win a Super Bowl, they're yours."

And while it's tough to expect an undefeated season, the Raiders took some unacceptable losses. They lost to an 0-5 Rams team, giving Marc Bulger a win (and a 3 touchdown performance) in his first start at quarterback.

They played catch-up with a mediocre Chargers team and took an overtime loss for their trouble. Their offense needed three-and-a-half quarters to score a touchdown in an ugly loss to Miami.

The home loss to the 49ers was gut-wrenching, as the Raiders had every chance to win the game handed to them and ultimately fell to a huge Garrison Hearst 4th and 1 conversion and a field goal in overtime.

On that day, the Raiders proved they were a flawed team. They got pounded by a superior running team and torched by Terrell Owens. It showed the league that any offense matching the Raiders' passing efficiency just needed a little defensive help to win.

A city has to buy into a playoff run, and the Bay Area lacked buyers. As an LA transplant to the Bay, I was used to fanfare. Los Angeles becomes a sea of car flags when the NBA playoffs begin, gaining ground with every Lakers win. Months before, the Giants won the NLCS and San Francisco turned into an orange and black madhouse.

Muni trains shook after every Giants win, "LETS GO GI-ANTS!" became the city's motto, and the scene at Phone Company Park was out of control. Surely Raiders fans wouldn't be out-done by wine-sipping, Halloween color-wearing west bay starch-collars, would they?

Walking around the East Bay after a Raiders game wasn't like the West Bay when the Giants inched closer to the playoffs in September. It felt like being a Raiders fan didn't come with territory, like we were more or less just "not-Niners fans."

Al's 13 year LA vacation proved disastrous. He lost the hearts of most of his die hard fan base, and lost an entire generation of Bay Area fans to Joe Montana and the 49ers' potent offense. The Raiders rarely sold out games, and a large percentage of fans came from outside the city.

Four hundred miles south, East Los Angeles was raging over the Raiders' Super Bowl run. A whole generation of children had been raised with the Raiders and were now having kids of their own. 70 percent of the Bay Area wasn't just disinterested in the Raiders, they were rooting against them.

The 49ers took a spanking in the NFC Championship, and if they weren't winning it all, they sure as hell didn't want to see little brother celebrate in the process.

So without the hearts of their own area, the Raiders set out on the "forgone conclusion" AFC Playoff tour, as they played two teams they'd already beaten at home during the season: a Jets squad that was the product of gross "get the big market involved so the ratings don't stink" media hype, and a broken Titans team that gave everything in a backyard brawl with the Steelers in the divisional round.

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