Oakland Raiders: Mystique has returned, making team a target

There are 32 teams in the NFL, but the Oakland Raiders stand out from the other 31. Put simply, the league is better when the Silver and Black are good.

Now that the entire league has recognized that last season’s success was no fluke for the Oakland Raiders, it’s time to move forward. Those physically nasty, mean and ruthless Raiders are here to run through peoples faces and then tell them about it. This team of men isn’t here to play nice, nor are they here to lose. You know what they came to do, and they’re fresh out of bubblegum.

Fans of the silver and black know the sweet words of Ed Sabol’s immortal poem, “The Autumn Wind“:

"The autumn wind is a pirate, blustering in from sea. With a rollicking song, he sweeps along swaggering boisterously his face is weather-beaten, he wears a hooded sash. With a silver hat about his head and a bristling black mustache. He growls as he storms the country, a villain big and bold, and the trees all shake and quiver and quake as he robs them of their gold. The autumn wind is a Raider pillaging just for fun he’ll knock you ’round and upside down and laugh when he’s conquered and won."

When Al Davis heard “The Autumn Wind”, he fell in love with it, because it epitomized everything the Raiders stood for. When these words were paired with the legendary voice of John Facenda, images of the old school Raiders flood your senses.

Entering the third week of the 2017 season, it appears the road to the Super Bowl will travel through the AFC West. Should the Raiders, Kansas City Chiefs, and Denver Broncos all win Sunday, it would mark the first time in the history of the league that three teams started the season off 3-0 in the same division.

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The Raiders currently have a top-three scoring offense, and the defense has shown significant improvement from last season and climbed to a respectable No. 17. Many a prognosticator has predicted that, should the Raiders employ just an average defense, that they had a shot to take it the distance.

But as Katt Williams will tell you, with success comes haters and, if you are really on your Ps and Qs, you should be trying to double your haters every year. Last year, the Raiders took Denver’s pride in Oakland. The Broncos would get a victory in Week 16, but that was a backup quarterback and a rookie seeing his first NFL action ever. The Raiders never beat the Chiefs in 2016, however.

But in 2017, both teams know that, in order to get to where they want to be in January and February, they are going to have to handle their business against each other. And Denver isn’t going away either. Bill Musgrave has taken the blueprints of 2016’s No.6 ranked scoring offense to Denver in hopes of furthering his own career and punishing the team who opted not to renew his contract.

A trend is starting to take place, teams and players are starting to be vocal through the media and provide bulletin board material for certain aspects of the team. On NFL Network’s Good Morning Football, Washington Redskins linebacker Zach Brown said he dared offenses to throw on the Redskins defense, and even offered on Marshawn Lynch saying it’s the same guy he was in Seattle, just with a better offensive line. Terrelle Pryor, a supplemental draft pick by Oakland, also said that he and Kirk Cousins would start to get on the same page against the Raiders.

The teams on the Raiders schedule all have them circled, because after what seems like an eternity in football purgatory, the Raiders are back and are scary good. The seasons are changing and, since the date is now Sept. 23, the Autumn Wind is blowing from the California coast all the way east.

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With Derek Carr at the helm of this offense, there is an MVP level quarterback, an average defense and an offense that will be worthy of its own name. And if for no other reason than just being a good football team, the mystique of the Raiders coming to town is back.

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