Oakland Raiders head coach Lane Kiffin almost lost his job the last week, just 2 games into the season, according to an ESPN report.

2 games? Yeah, maybe that was a bit rash. 3 games is apparently better. The Raiders are now rumored to fire Kiffin as early as today.

Yeah, so what else is new in the Raider Nation.

Well, Kiffin lashing out at owner Al Davis in public, that's what. More importantly, Kiffin is the first active Raiders coach that I can recall that's ever openly taken jabs at the megalomaniac Davis.

In fact, it seems Kiffin is doing everything in his power to get fired.

Depending on what you believe, this all started late last year with Davis going so far as to draft letter of resignation for Kiffin this past January, which Kiffin refused to sign. Kiffin and Davis have been at odds in public ever since.

Kiffin has also criticized defensive coordinator Rob Ryan and Davis, ""Hey, go ask Al and the coordinator, they're calling all that stuff."

All I can say is: It's about damned time somebody, anybody in the Raiders organization stood up to the meddling, senile Davis.

Considered a football visionary, Davis was enshrined into the Hall of Fame in 1992.

Now, Davis is a man who has clearly lost touch with the modern style of NFL play. And bit by agonizing bit, he's undoing his once proud and feared franchise.

For starters, the Raiders are one of a handful of NFL teams where the owner is also the general manager. All personnel decisions--and hell, probably even some plays in the playbook--go through or are made by Davis.

Why is this lack of a GM important? It means there is no buffer between Davis and whoever the coach may be. That coach is essentially left without any one in his corner to fight for personnel decisions or defend him to the owner. While there certainly have been scenarios where the coach held both the coach and GM duties (ex: Seattle's Mike Holmgren for a number years held this position) or shared the GM duties with the owner (ex: Jerry Jones and Bill Parcells), those men had already achieved success in the NFL and were highly respected. Kiffin is all of 33 years old and this is his first job as head coach.

Kiffin is really caught between a rock and a true megalomaniac. He can't resign; he'd lose the money from the final 2 years of his contract. And who wants to do that to himself or put his family under the strain of potential long-term unemployment? His only recourse is to fire back at Davis through the press and hope he gets canned. Even then Kiffin loses because, no matter how wrong the perception might be, he comes across as a bitter employee. What a crappy thing to have to endure.

But Kiffin is certainly aware that he isn't the first to endure this crap from Davis:

"You have to look at the history. History is what it is, that he doesn't keep people very long....We don't have a general manager; everything goes through the owner. That sets up a difficult situation at times. Knowing who the owner is, you know from day one there's no job security."

Kiffin's right. You have to look at Davis' history, and not very deeply either to discover that, as the Japanese proverb goes, "a fish stinks from the head."

Whether or not Kiffin is fired today or tomorrow or next week, it makes little difference. Whoever replaces him in the future will encounter and have to endure the same tyrannical, blindly egotistic and eccentric owner. It's happened to nearly every Raider coach since John Madden: Tom Flores, Mike Shanahan, Joe Bugel, Mike White, Art Shell (twice!) and Jon Gruden. This is nothing new.

Davis simply can't stand to have any coach tell him how his team can succeed and be competitive in today's NFL. When Gruden attempted to radically (and successfully) change the Raiders offensive scheme from a 60's-style vertical pass attack to a West Coast-style offense, Davis was quietly unhappy. There was little he could or do say given Gruden's success, particularly in light of making it to the 2000 AFC Championship game.

Naturally, the Championship game wasn't enough.

In 2001, Davis put the screws to Gruden to get to and win the Super Bowl--something the 2001 Raiders were heavily favored to do. Then the infamous "Tuck Rule" game happened and Gruden was done. That loss gave Davis all the ammunition he needed to justify in "trading" Gruden to Tampa Bay for draft picks.

Gruden exacted his revenge 12 months later when the Raiders and the Buccaneers met in Super Bowl XXXVIII. Final score: Bucs 48, Raiders 21.

Davis must've been beside himself.

Here was this coach, a guy who had never even played a down of NFL football and barely any college football, now standing with the Lombardi Trophy in his hands after beating living crap out of his Raiders in front of a worldwide audience. A guy Davis essentially fired thinking he couldn't take him to The Promised Land with his style of football.

The Raiders have been just God awful ever since.

What assures we Raider fans more years of painful 2-14 seasons, is that Davis has never hired a coach with a proven track record of success in the NFL greater than his own. Ever. His ego simply can't handle it. So you will never see Bill Cowher or Jimmy Johnson or Mike Ditka or any one else of that type of coaching stature apply for head coach of the Raiders. What would be the point. They'd just have to cow tow to Davis.

My final thought on Davis is this: Every time the camera pans to Davis sitting his suite staring blankly down at another pummeling of his team, I see a bitterly defiant, Charles Foster Kane-esque old man, watching the dream of his team "winning two Super Bowls before his dies", slowly disintegrate before him, yard by yard. It's sad, but also cosmically fitting. I even derive some pleasure in watching it all implode before him because it's all his doing. It evens out the bad play on the field in a way.

So if Kiffin does get fired, good for him, he gets his money and maybe even a shot at another NFL coaching job.

As for we Raiders fans? Well, we're guaranteed a continued lack of success until, to be completely honest, Davis shuffles off this mortal coil.