Go, Browns - or whoever is playing the Raiders

William L. Bryan, Special to the News

Published October 2, 2006 at midnight

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As the Broncos took this week off, Broncos fans were left to cheer for their second-favorite team, the Cleveland Browns.

Normally, Broncos fans as a group do not particularly care about the Browns, except perhaps a mild sympathy for wrongs suffered so great that they are known by single, capitalized words. The Drive. The Fumble. But this week, the Browns had Bronco Nation firmly behind them because they played the Oakland Raiders. No matter how bad the Raiders are, their misfortune is our joy, and they can always make us happy by being worse.

In a numbing battle of winless teams, this week's worst reason to have DirecTV, the Raiders somehow managed to surrender a 21-3 lead to lose 24-21. The Browns are on the board with their first win, and we dance the dance of many joys in their stead.

Nobody would argue that the Raiders' problem is Al Davis, but as has been noted so many times, you cannot fire the owner. You cannot fire the general manager because it has been more than 30 years since the Raiders even pretended to have one. You cannot even fire the coach because, of all the B-list candidates Davis interviewed this past off-season, exactly none of them wanted his stinking coaching job.

Shell has not held a head coaching position since 1994, when Al Davis fired him the first time, and everybody has heard the jokes about offensive coordinator Tom Walsh running a bed-and-breakfast in Idaho last year, as though Idaho was Walsh's biggest problem.

On Sunday, Davis' C-list coaching staff managed to call a game in which they were up 18 points, averaged more than 8 yards per carry, did not fumble and still lost the second-half time of possession an astonishing 20:32 to 9:28. How is that even possible?

As has been the case since Jon Gruden left the Raiders' organization in 2002, the team's lack of attention to detail was glaring. The Raiders' special teams gave up 53- and 65-yard kickoff returns to one Josh Cribbs (yeah, me neither), who came into the game averaging a pedestrian 22.6 yards per return. They also surrendered a 58-yard punt return.

Al Davis favorite Andrew Walter, a third-string signal caller as recently as August, played the entire game. He averaged 1.6 yards per attempt and finishing with a deceptively high 46.8 passer rating. He looked completely lost, and many of his passes were clearly intended for a different pattern than his receiver ran.

For a team that ran the ball as well as they did, the Raiders somehow managed to put Walter in third-and-long 13 times. Randy Moss, probably the most electric player of his generation, finished with one catch for 5 yards. The Browns' starting cornerbacks are Daven Holly and Leigh Bodden (yeah, me neither), so I am guessing Moss was open more than just that one time.

Next week, the San Francisco 49ers will take over as Bronco Nation's second-favorite team, but the Raiders' problems will remain the same.