Al Davis and the Oakland Raiders: The Full Story of Pro Football’s Most Defiant Owner
The Only Man to Hold Every Job in Pro Football
There’s a fact about Al Davis that the Pro Football Hall of Fame puts right at the top of his biography, and it’s the kind of thing that sounds made up until you check it: he is the only person in the history of professional football to have served as a scout, assistant coach, head coach, general manager, league commissioner, and principal owner of a team. Not two of those things. Not four. All six. No one else has come close.
He was born July 4, 1929, in Brockton, Massachusetts, grew up in Brooklyn, and died October 8, 2011, in Oakland – the city whose football team he’d spent nearly five decades building, fighting for, relocating, suing over, and refusing to let go of. The Raiders under Davis won three Super Bowls (XI, XV, XVIII), 13 divisional titles, and one AFL championship. They also produced some of the worst draft decisions in NFL history. Both things are true, and Davis wouldn’t have apologized for either.
Brooklyn Kid Who Talked His Way Into Coaching
Davis wasn’t a standout anything in school. At Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn he was a reserve on the basketball team. At Syracuse University he tried out for baseball, tried out for basketball, and made neither varsity squad. What he had instead was an almost pathological need to be around football – he haunted the Syracuse football team’s practices until they asked him to leave, then took the assistant coaches’ strategy courses that were only supposed to be open to players.
When he graduated in 1950 with a degree in English and started looking for coaching work, he introduced himself around Long Island as “Davis from Syracuse” – a phrasing he almost certainly chose to blur together with George Davis, a star halfback for the university’s actual football team. The Adelphi College athletic director turned him away. Davis went over his head to the college president. Thirty minutes later the athletic director got a call: he had a new freshman football coach. His biographer Mark Ribowsky, writing in 1991, called it a combination of “bluff and con.” Davis never disputed it.
The Army drafted him in 1952. He avoided Korea by agreeing to coach the Fort Belvoir team in Virginia, which tells you something about how quickly he’d learned to turn situations to his advantage. Two years later he was scouting for the Baltimore Colts, then coaching the offensive line at The Citadel, then doing the same at USC from 1957 through 1959. By the time the AFL placed a franchise in Los Angeles, Davis had been in football coaching rooms for a decade without ever playing a meaningful down.
33 Years Old, Head Coach, and Already Running the Whole Thing
He joined the AFL’s Los Angeles Chargers in 1960 as wide receivers coach and spent three seasons there before Oakland came calling in January 1963. The Raiders had gone 9–33 in their first three years of existence. Davis was 33, the youngest person in pro football history to simultaneously hold the head coach and general manager positions. Sports Illustrated had already called him a “young coaching genius.” Scholastic Coach Magazine called him “the most inventive mind in the country.” Neither publication was wrong.
In 1963, his first season, the Raiders went 10–4. A team picked to finish last won its division. Davis was named AFL Coach of the Year by the AP, UPI, Sports Illustrated, and The Sporting News – all four. The Oakland Chamber of Commerce named him the city’s Young Man of the Year, the first time they’d given the award to a sports figure.
His coaching philosophy was built around the vertical passing game – throwing deep, stretching defenses, using speed at wide receiver as a weapon before most of the league understood that was possible. He compiled a 23–16–3 record in three seasons as head coach. That’s a .583 winning percentage on a franchise that had been 9–33 before he arrived.
Six Weeks as Commissioner and the AFL-NFL Merger
In April 1966, AFL owners appointed Davis as league commissioner at age 36. He didn’t want the job. He was a football coach and he knew taking the commissionership would end that. But the AFL was at war with the NFL over players and television money, and the owners wanted someone aggressive at the wheel, not a diplomat.
Davis’s strategy was direct: go after the NFL’s top quarterbacks. Sign them or make the NFL pay so much to keep them that the financial bleeding would force a settlement. Ralph Wilson, AFL president and owner of the Buffalo Bills, had described Davis to other owners as “a coaching genius and astute administrator.” What they got was a wartime operator.
Within eight weeks of Davis taking the job, the AFL and NFL announced a merger. Davis hadn’t exactly negotiated it – he’d created the conditions that made the NFL’s owners decide the fight was no longer worth having. He opposed the merger terms, believing the AFL had been outmaneuvered in the final deal, and resigned as commissioner to return to Oakland as managing general partner. Pete Rozelle would run the combined league. Davis would spend the next 20 years finding creative ways to make Rozelle’s life difficult.
Building the Dynasty – Silver, Black, and a Specific Kind of Player
Back in Oakland with full operational control, Davis started assembling what would become one of the most successful franchises in American sports history. In 1969 he hired John Madden as head coach. Madden was 33 – Davis had a pattern with that age – and had been the Raiders’ linebackers coach. Eight years later, Madden had a Super Bowl ring.
The Raiders won Super Bowl XI in January 1977, beating the Minnesota Vikings 32–14 in Pasadena. Davis held the Lombardi Trophy in the locker room afterward while Madden bear-hugged anything that moved. That was the first championship. The second came after the 1980 season under Tom Flores, a 27–10 win over the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl XV in New Orleans – a game where Jim Plunkett, a quarterback everyone else had given up on, threw three touchdown passes. The third was the 38–9 demolition of the Washington Redskins in Super Bowl XVIII, played in January 1984, when the Raiders were already the Los Angeles Raiders, having moved south two years earlier.
From 1967 through 1985 the franchise won 13 divisional titles and made the playoffs 15 times. The Raiders’ winning percentage since Davis arrived in 1963 – .568 through 2011 – ranks third in NFL history behind only the Cowboys and the Dolphins. Davis’s specific philosophy for building rosters is part of why: he wanted fast players, physically unique players, players other teams had cut or given up on, players with reputations. He turned Ken Stabler into one of the most dangerous quarterbacks of the 1970s. He took a chance on Jim Plunkett when everyone else had moved on. He drafted wide receivers who could run 4.4 forties when most teams were still building around tight ends and fullbacks.
Who He Hired Before Anyone Else Did
Davis recruited Black players from historically Black colleges in the South that NFL scouts weren’t visiting. In 1967 he drafted guard Gene Upshaw from Texas A&I – now Texas A&M-Kingsville – in the first round. Upshaw became a Hall of Famer. In 1968, Davis drafted Eldridge Dickey from Tennessee State in the first round, making Dickey the first Black quarterback selected in the first round of any major professional football draft.
He refused to schedule Oakland games in cities where Black and white players had to stay in separate hotels. This wasn’t a press release. It was a policy, held quietly and consistently.
In 1979 he hired Tom Flores as head coach after Madden retired – Flores became the first Latino head coach in NFL history. In 1989, after Flores left, Davis hired Art Shell, making Shell the first African-American head coach in the modern NFL era. Shell went 54–38 in six seasons, with three playoff appearances. Davis also hired Amy Trask as the team’s chief executive, the first woman to hold that role with an NFL franchise.
None of this was celebrated loudly at the time. Davis wasn’t building a diversity portfolio – he was building a football team and hiring the people he thought were best for it, without the filters most of the league was using. The Raiders Maven series on SI.com quoted former team executive Tom LaMarre putting it plainly: “Al Davis, he was colorblind and that was one of the reasons why he was able to turn the Raiders around.”
The Lawsuit That Moved a Franchise
In 1980, Davis tried to move the Raiders to Los Angeles. The NFL blocked him with a court injunction. Davis filed an antitrust suit against the league, arguing the NFL was operating as an illegal cartel by controlling where franchises could locate. The legal battle ran two years. In June 1982, a federal district court ruled in his favor – the Raiders officially became the Los Angeles Raiders that season.
The following year they won Super Bowl XVIII. In the argument over whether Davis’s instincts were sound, that result tends to settle things.
He eventually brought the Raiders back to Oakland in 1995 after the city agreed to stadium renovations, then sued the NFL again claiming the league had sabotaged his efforts to build a stadium in Inglewood. He went to court against the NFL more than six times over his career. He lost more of those battles than he won, but the antitrust suit – the one that mattered most – he won cleanly.
The Later Years: Speed, Busts, and Stubbornness
The late 1990s and 2000s were not kind to the Raiders. The same draft philosophy that had worked brilliantly in the 1960s and 70s – prioritize speed, take physical freaks, ignore the doubters – produced a string of selections that became cautionary tales. In 2000, Davis used the 17th overall pick on kicker Sebastian Janikowski, a 250-pound kicker, ahead of dozens of players who went on to Pro Bowls. In 2007, Davis selected quarterback JaMarcus Russell with the first overall pick ahead of Calvin Johnson, Adrian Peterson, and Patrick Willis. Russell started two seasons at LSU, lasted three years in Oakland, and never played another NFL game.
The 2002 season briefly looked like a return to something. The Raiders went 11–5, won the AFC Championship, and played in Super Bowl XXXVII. Tampa Bay beat them 48–21. Jon Gruden, who had coached the Raiders for four seasons before Davis traded him to Tampa Bay, knew every one of Oakland’s offensive plays. The outcome was uncomfortable in ways that still get discussed in Oakland.
After that, the losses accumulated. Davis kept coming to practice, kept wearing the tracksuit, kept running the draft room. He was 79 years old in 2008 when the Raiders went 5–11. He died three years later. The franchise he’d built from 9–33 in 1962 was still his on October 8, 2011, when he passed away in Oakland at age 82. His son Mark Davis took over as managing general partner.
What He Actually Changed
Davis was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1992, while he was still running the Raiders. He spent 20 more years in the building after that. His Hall of Fame entry notes what no other person’s does: he held every meaningful role in the sport. Scout. Assistant coach. Head coach. General manager. League commissioner. Principal owner. That’s not a resume – it’s a map of an obsession that lasted six decades.
On the field, his vertical passing philosophy eventually became the default for most of the NFL. The premium on receiver speed, the willingness to let a quarterback throw deep on early downs – these were Davis’s instincts before they were anyone else’s standard practice. Three Super Bowls and a .568 all-time winning percentage under his ownership are the numbers. But the draft philosophy, the hiring practices, and the antitrust lawsuit that established a franchise’s legal right to relocate over the league’s objection are the parts that shaped the sport beyond just Oakland’s record.
“Just win, baby” was the phrase he lived by. It sounds simple. So does everything that actually works.
Comments