Raiders Leap-Frog Redskins in Worst Franchise Race

GOOD NEWS ALERT!! The Redskins achieved victory this weekend by not playing, and through the release of some damning news about their main rival. If you think I'm referring to the Cowboys here, you must have just awoken from a 20 year coma. In which case welcome to the Internet! Also, Buffalo wings are now a national thing, China is our main international rival, Taco Bell makes a black-shelled taco, and you can say "shit" on national TV. There, now you're caught up.

Except with respect to the Redskins, whose most glorious battle these days is being fought in the public eye instead of on the gridiron, against the Raiders instead of the Cowboys, and for the title of "most embarrassing professional sports organization" instead of the Super Bowl. Well this weekend, (un?)fortunately, the Raiders managed to leap-frog the Burgundy and Gold with release of the news that their head coach, Tom Cable, is a wife-beater. This on the heels of reports that Cable broke an assistant coach's jaw this summer. Rad!

Now let's be clear: Cable can't be the first head coach to have problems with the ol' ultraviolence at home. And players are not immune to this either (see Marshall, Brandon). But Tom Cable's spousal abuse has been documented FOR OVER TWENTY YEARS. How lazy, dumb, and/or willfully blind do you have to be to hire a scumbag like this? You think you're gonna change the culture of losing by having impressionable young football players follow Ike Turner's example?

The most telling part of the Raiders' incompetence in this oversight is that Cable physically abused a woman as recently as THE MONTH HE WAS HIRED: January 2009. I mean, it's one thing to excuse events long past. It's quite another to fail in basic due diligence, you know, maybe asking a recent girlfriend "hey, so what's Tommy Boy like after he's quaffed a few?" Call me crazy, but if you're going to put your $100 million+ on-the-field investment in the hands of a guy, you'd hope those hands would be good for character molding and not punching women in the face. The alternative explanation, that the Raiders knew all along and simply didn't care, is far more damning.

The Redskins might operate like the Third Reich with their dissent-banning and pathological denials; their marketing department may have received degrees from the Somalian School of Piracy; their owner may derive sustenance from baby seal blood and be as ruinously meddlesome as Mr. Nosferatu Al Davis; but at least they don't hire wife beaters. So, good job Redskins. That's one humongous comparative NOT FAIL we can now stack against the thousands of other FAILS in this race towards epic humiliation. You were in the lead for a while there.

Your move, Snyder.