By Guest Contributor Raiders Sports Guy

Do you want to know why Stanford Routt got let go by the Raiders and promptly signed with the Chiefs?

Because that’s HOW IT GOES, MAN.

More educated folks will tell you it’s beause the Raiders would’ve owed him a bunch of money if he was still on the roster on the such and such a date, and BASG tells me that’s true.

But here’s what I think: Routt was a lot like Tim McKyer. He had a far higher opinion of himself than was reflected by reality.

Sure, you can’t teach speed. Routt didn’t need to be taught that. But he did seem to be another Silver and Black clad example of an axiom that should get tossed around as much as “You can’t teach speed,” which is “You Can’t Teach Talent and Brains.”

Routt sucked.

If he would’ve signed with a New York team, the Post would’ve had a field day coming up with headlines for his name after he got burned big by East Coast WR’s…

Here’s a few to get you started!

“Running the Wrong Routt.”

“Time To Take A Different Routt.”

“Mis-timed Routt”

Yeah, he knew better than to play in a market that would’ve eviscerated his all-flash, no-substance style of play.

The guy got rung up for a ton of penalties last season. When the Raiders screwed everything up against the Lions, I felt like Routt was playing his version of the ol’ “Hack A Shaq” against Megatron.

There was no way in hell he was going to effectively cover him (and neither was Rolando McClain late in the fourth quarter, and YES, I’m still angry about it), so instead, he resigned himself to just grabbing arms when it looked like he was going to wind up on SportsCenter, vainly chasing Megatron into the endzone. Yeah, Routtster, it was a better plan to grab him all day and walk back to the defensive huddle with your hands on your hips like you’d just done some onerous chore.

So he’s a Chief. To them I say, “Good Luck.”

Freddie Mitchell and Stanford Routt are eerily similar. If you don’t remember Freddie, he was a forgettable WR for the Eagles when Terrell Owens played in the Super Bowl with a broken leg and a huge ego … Freddie all but asked the national media to call him “FredEx” in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, because, you know, he delivers!

Well, he didn’t. Terrell gave an inspired performance, in the same way Curt Schilling’s bloody sock was inspiring if you were a drunk Massachusetts stereotype.

Cutting ties with Routt is the big roster move thus far.

Don’t go TOO far…

The other name I hear getting bandied about is Tommy Kelly.

No. Stop. Don’t. This would be such a mistake.

Tommy was very solid last season, and I know Richard Seymour made the Pro Bowl and lots of plays. However, many of those plays are stupid, and Seymour clearly plays with his own agenda.

I think we should’ve traded Seymour to CInicinatti for Carson Palmer, and according to Jamie Escalante, that teacher played by Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver, a negative times a negative equals a positive.

So if that trade was made, both of their negatives would’ve been cancelled out. Carson would’ve stopped making excuses and blaming others for his lot in life, and Richard Seymour would stop playing the game with the self-control of Charlie Sheen.

SPEAKING OF DEAD WEIGHT….

I bid thee farewell, John Herrera.

You were a living embodiment of everything wrong with the Oakland executive team.

A low-rent flunky who worked his way up from Ball Boy to Ball Man on the strength of his ability to be a hatchet man for Mr. Davis.

While Bruce Allen (son of legendary NFL coach George Allen — and by the way, if you want to read a great book about NFL life, check out Allen’s daughter’s The Fifth Quarter) went on to greener pastures when he was hired away by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, for some strange reason no one hired Herrera away.

Hmmm…

By now everyone has seen Herrera berating Tim Kawakami at a Raiders presser, and it’s funny for how it provided a glimpse into the real Raider Mystique.

It showed us how strange and musty the Mystique had become.

It was revealing and sad in a different way than finding out that Mr. Allen Davis lived and died in the Oakland Airport Hilton.

I used to have this old neighbor who was a dance instructor in Hollywood in the ’70s. He had these three feaux leather photo albums and he’d dig them out when drunk and act like he’d never dug them out before, and he’d show me pictures of himself taken with people he had to name. “Well, of course you remember Della Rogers, she had a wonderful part in the underrated film Lost Lovers, and she was all over the television set in those days.” He did have one photo with the guy who played Larry on ChiPs, but that was about it.

He was convinced that those people were still stars; that their style and taste was the stuff that Hollywood was made of. And he would tell me time and again about these different B actresses he taught the Cha Cha to, all while drinking cheap beer in a polyester suit with wide lapels and fake alligator skin shoes. He would later become seriously addicted to video poker and move to Laughlin. Sometimes I wonder if he’s still alive.

Herrera was the kind of guy who helped Al continue to believe that he was still hip, current, and in touch. Now he’s out on his ass, and I say good riddance.

He’s not alone. There’s enough fired Raiders staffers to start up a support group.

Mr. McKenzie has hired half a dozen staffers, not the least of which being new Head Coach Dennis Allen. I’m not going to get into a bunch of analysis on Allen except to say he’s got a GREAT NAME for a Head Coach.

And when Mr. McKenzie introduced him at a press conference a few weeks ago, he called Allen ” what the doctor ordered”.

Which is to say he realizes The Raiders are very sick.

He’s not in denial.

For now, that’s good enough for me.

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The Raiders Sports Guy, Francis Mayer, has extensive experience in radio as a producer in Bakersfield, as a former morning show host at 106.1 KRAB and now producing a local morning news show. He and BASG played on the same Babe Ruth baseball team as 13-year-olds, and Francis still talks about that time he struck out the side in his only pitching appearance of the season. He’s also a fan of the Oakland Raiders and Minnesota Twins, a strange pairing of teams that’s never been fully explained.