Tom Cable's Faces Hard Acts To Follow as Oakland Raiders Head Coach

It just makes sense to get a selective view of the history of the coaching careers of those men who coached the Oakland Raiders over the history of the franchise. This is a limited view, but still much can be learned from the study of the data for each coach.

Clearly, John Madden coached more games than any other Raider coach. A few good men are listed near him in rank, if we look at the number of games coached.

142	Madden
92	Shell
92	Gruden
88	Flores
88	White

Where does Cable rank in having the opportunity to coach the Raiders? His rank, 11th, is not at the bottom, and it accounts for the 28 games he has been able to coach.

Now, let's look at the win percentages of all of the sixteen coaches during the 50 year history of the Raiders. Art Shell is listed two times and so is Tom Flores. This is why the table has 18 entries rather than 16 which represents the number of distinct men who have had opportunity to coach the Raiders.

The list of actual win percentages is:

These percentages are rounded in the table.

Clearly the fifth and sixth coach have higher averages than the others. Who are these outstanding Oakland Raiders' coaches? Who else? John Rauch and John Madden.

Here is data for some very good years in the history of the Oakland Raiders:

Al Davis†	1963–1965	42	23	16	3	0.59
John Rauch	1966–1968	42	33	8	1	0.805
John Madden†*	1969–1978	142	103	32	7	0.763
Tom Flores	1979–1981	48	27	21	0	0.563	Oakland
Tom Flores[a]	1982–1987	88	76	32	0	0.704	Los Angeles

Once again we are taking a good look at the data and the history it captures.

One thing is certain. If Tom Cable continues as the head coach of the Oakland Raiders, he will indeed have a hard act to follow. When the Oakland Raiders were good, they were very good.

Can the team pull the win percentage up by more than .4, yielding a win percentage in the range of .563 to .805?

By the way, .805 is the maximum win percentage for the entire history of the franchise, and the man who led the team during that era was John Rauch.

Remain hopeful Raider Nation, and vote "yes."

Go Raiders!

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