Thirty-Two Franchises: Las Vegas Raiders

Began in the AFL in 1960; joined the NFL for the 1970 Season.

All-Time Record:  509-480-11 (.515)

1960-1981:  Oakland Raiders:  195-110-11 (.638)

1982-1994:  Los Angeles Raiders:  118-82-0 (.590)

1995-2019:  Oakland Raiders:  160-240-0 (.400)

2020-2025:  Las Vegas Raiders:  36-48-0 (.429)

This is the only time you will see me use their current name.  To me, they will always be "Oakland."

At the end of the 1994 season, the Raiders had an all-time record of 313-192-11 (.617).  Today, none of the 32 existing franchises has an all-time winning percentage higher than .574.

Super Bowl Record:  3-2 (XI, XV, XVIII) (1976, 1980, 1983)

Top Passer:  Derek Carr (35,222 yds)

Top Rusher:  Marcus Allen (8,545 yds)

Top Receiver:  Tim Brown (14,734 yds)

Top Coach:  John Madden (103 wins)

Top All-Time Player Based on Approximate Value:  Jim Otto (AV of 163)

Otto was a ten-time All-Pro.  He was an All-Pro in every season from 1960 to 1970, with the exception of 1966.  In 1966, he was a second-team All-Pro.

NFL23 Update: Hail to the Chiefs (Again)!

Congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs! When I searched "Kansas City Chiefs" on Google a second ago, fireworks flew across the screen of my laptop.

And deservedly so! For my money, not I of the previous LVII Super Bowls was any more entertaining than last night's event featuring the Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reid, Travis Kelce, Harrison Butker, Chris Jones and the rest of the victor Chiefs; the worthy San Francisco 49ers; Taylor Swift and (hopefully) her future in-laws; Jim Nantz and Tony Romo; Andra Day, Post Malone and Reba McEntire; Dan Marino; Usher and Alicia Keys, and the rest. Starting at about 5 Central, I watched with my family virtually every second of CBS's remaining five hours of TV coverage from Las Vegas, and, my gosh, I felt so thankful to have gotten to experience the thing.

Furthermore, the Chiefs have now won two Super Bowls in a row, played in four since 2019 (winning three) and now are now 4-2 in all-time Super Bowl appearances. All time, that's the sixth-most Super Bowl appearances and fifth-most victories (along with the Green Bay Packers and New York Giants) for Kansas City, which also won more AFL championships (three) than any other team. What a franchise!

Did you know that the Chiefs' defense from 1966 through 1971 was apparently nicknamed "The Redwood Forest?" I did not. In fact, I don't think I exactly knew that the Chiefs' offense from 2018 through 2021 was apparently nicknamed "The Legion of Doom." I remember hearing Nantz and others say "The Legion of Doom" when I happened to be watching football games off mute during that time period, but I guess I always figured they were just making something up out of thin air to promote some comic-book movie that was out at the time and never paid much attention. Anyway, I learned both of these notes this morning from the Chiefs' Wikipedia page, which I intend to read over the next several days as I think back over my favorite memories from my very fun Sunday night.

Of course, at my typical HP pace, that will likely take me right through to kickoff of the Miami Dolphins' victory in Super Bowl LIX (Feb. 9, 2025, in New Orleans). Hail to the Chiefs, and comments flow!

My 10 Favorite Songs of the Last Seven Days

The hits just keep coming from the Jerry Lewis's 1975 MDA telethon. I attend church now in Madisonville with a woman who did youth ministry at a church in Las Vegas, where she worked with the New Zoo Revue people.

1. Rocketman movements 1 and 2, Marching Maroons
2. "Fly the Flag of Freedom," New Zoo Revue on 1975 Jerry Lewis MDA telethon
3. "Hounds of Love," Kate Bush
4. "The Laws Have Changed," New Pornographers on The Late Show with David Letterman 2003
5. "Hello Sunday! Hello Road!" Gil Scott-Heron live on With Ossie and Ruby 1975
6. "One-of-a-Kind Love Affair," Spinners live in Zaire
7. "Expert in a Dying Field," Beths
8. "The Nitty Gritty," Shirley Ellis with Bobby Banas live on The Judy Garland Show 1964
9. "That’s What You Get for Loving Me," Waylon Jennings
10. "2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten," Lucinda Williams

1975: What's On TV Tonight (And The Next 21.5 Hours)?

24 Aug 1975, Sun The Lexington Herald (Lexington, Kentucky) Newspapers.com

29 Aug 1975, Fri The Paducah Sun (Paducah, Kentucky) Newspapers.com
There's a boatload of stuff from Jerry Lewis's 1975 MDA telethon on YouTube. But I know you're busy, so just could just check out the next 15 minutes or so after this video starts ...

This was Frank Sinatra's first appearance in Jerry Lewis's 10 (so far) telethons. I really like his rich-guy moves in the breaks between the songs, and I really like his pingponging between covers of recent hits by other people (like "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown") and standards for which his are regarded as the definitive performances (like "They Can't Take That Away From Me"). He sure was good, wasn't he?

None of these songs appears to be available as a standalone video on YouTube. If they were out there, they would've each made this list. But, whatever, here are my 10 favorite songs otherwise from those most-of-two days over Labor Day weekend:

1. “How Sweet It Is,” Lou Rawls
2. “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” house orchestra (with Jerry Lewis dancing with a lollipop)
3. “Love Me Or Leave Me,” Peggy Lee
4. “Fallin’ In Love Again,” Patti York
5. “What Good Is a Song,” Annette Thomas
6. “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” Frank Sinatra
7. “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” Charo
8. “Smell the Roses,” Johnny Tillotson
9. “With a Song in My Heart”/“Tie a Yellow Ribbon”/“Top of the World” medley (with “Button Up Your Overcoat” encore), Singing Cedars
10. “Then Came You,” Christian Brothers

Jerry Lewis was from Newark, New Jersey. I think I might be the only person in the world who was a fan of the Newark airport before its modernizations of the last five or six years. 

Here are the previous and future 1975 reports. 

Andy Griffith, Intermission

“Everything we ever said on the show, we believed; I suppose that’s what made it work.”

“I don’t know what we’re going to do when Don leaves. And I got up and left, and she wrote it just exactly that way. It was the best article ever written on me.”

“I’m not bragging. I just want to clear up something.”

“Dick and I hit television situation on its rise; Jerry hit it on its decline.”

“Dick Van Dyke cannot stand on a nightclub stage and tell a joke.”

“It starts Sept. 23 … right? Yeah. And I will be a guest in four episodes. I happen to be a guest in the first episode. The character Helen and I get married.”

I find every moment of this whole, two-part conversation, from 1968, fascinating.

I Love Tony Orlando

The Twitter desk is pleased to announce that it began following Tony Orlando today.

Tony Orlando appeared on the Channel 6 telethon at some point pretty soon after the release of Ghostbusters, the greatest movie made during our lifetimes (5 stars, highly recommended), and some kid asked him to do the theme song, and it was evident that it wasn't in his repertoire. Regardless, Tony Orlando told the WPSD orchestra to let it rip, and he completely sold out to a Vegasy sendup:  

Bustin' makes me feel good!

Feel GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!

FEEEEEEEL GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!!!

The kid was ecstatic, and I've been a huge, huge Tony Orlando advocate ever since.

Prayers for Leon Spinks; the 58th-annual Telethon of Stars is scheduled for Nov. 8 and 9, and rest in peace, President Eisenhower. 

President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a champion of peace. @IkeLibrary
— Tony Orlando (@TonyOrlando) October 13, 2014

XXII Olympic Winter Games, Sochi 2014 (Day 5)

Hey, we got one! The Team USA men's curlers took down Denmark, 7-4, this morning, as John Shuster and the boys rallied from 3-0 down.

A third of the round-robin tournament is over, and the Americans are 1-2. That's tied for fifth--behind China, Norway and Sweden at 3-0 and Great Britain at 2-1. Canada, Denmark and Switzerland are 1-2, and Germany and Russia are 0-3. Each team plays the other nine in the round-robin tournament, and the best four records advance to the medals tournament. So, we'll see.

The only Olympic Winter Games at which the United States won a curling medal was Torino 2006. A rink skipped by Pete Fenson, a 34-year-old pizzeria owner from Bemidji, Minn., claimed bronze. John Shuster, a 23-year-old from Chisholm, Minn., earned one of those Olympic medals as the lead of the Fenton rink.

At the "Curling for Dummies Cheat Sheet," Bob Weeks writes, "The skip is the captain of the team and decides the strategy. It’s the skip’s job to tell the other players where to throw their shots and when to sweep. The skip also delivers the last two shots of the end. The skip must be good at all types of shots."

"The lead," Weeks continues, "throws the first two rocks of the end and then sweeps the next six. The lead must be very good at throwing guards and a strong sweeper." (Wikipedia adds, "(L)eads are usually proficient at throwing guards and other draws, and throw few takeouts or other power shots.")

But Shuster didn't want to be a lead (Matthew DeGorge wrote in a terrific Feb. 12, 2012, story for The Delaware County Times of Upper Darby Township, Pa.) Shuster wanted to be a skip.

Things worked out pretty well. Shuster broke from Fenson's rink, started his own and qualified for the Vancouver 2010 games.

Then came, as DeGorge labeled it, "the Vancouver debacle." NBC had taped an interview before the Olympics in which Shuster talked about being "almost addicted" to the pressure of having the last rock. The United States opened the tournament with four straight losses, and, in three of them, Shuster--in a signature baseball cap that drew even more attention to himself--had the last rock with a chance to win and failed to do so. In mid-tournament, Shuster was benched.

And that might've been the last we ever heard about Shuster at the Olympics. He withdrew from the 2010 national championships, which occurred just a few weeks after the Vancouver Games. He did not skip a rink that participated in the 2011 national championships. He did enter a rink in 2012 and '13 national championships, and the first- and second-place finishers would earn automatic berths for the 2013 U.S. Olympic Curling Trials--but Shuster's rink failed to finish so high.

But in the complicated rules of the U.S. Olympic Curling Trials, the United States Curling Association's "High Performance Program (HPP) Selection Committee" selected a fifth rink for the November 2013 tournament in Fargo, N.D. Shuster's rink, which had placed third in the two previous national championships, was the choice.

Hats off to Shuster that he and the rest of his rink made the most of the opportunity. Dad of a 6-month-old and a manager of Duluth's venerable Pickwick Restaurant & Pub, Shuster could practice only sporadically in advance of the tournament. In Fargo, though, the Shuster rink won six of eight round-robin games against the four 2012 and '13 national champions and runners-up. That was the best performance in the tournament. Shuster's and the second-place team in the round-robin portion advanced to the best-of-three finals.

And that rink was none other than Pete Fenson's.

Shuster, now 31, and Fenson, 45, waged a back-and-forth affair. The first game, on Friday, Nov. 15, saw Shuster open an 8-3 advantage after seven of 10 "ends" before his old skip scored 2, 2 and 1 to force an 11th, in which the Shuster rink prevailed for a 9-8 victory. In Saturday's Game 2, it was Shuster who rallied from behind, with a 10th-end score, before Fenson's rink won in the 11th, 5-4, to force a Sunday rubber game.

"No problem," Fenson told the Bemidji Pioneer back home. "We have been through it a lot of times. Like I said, my team handles these big games really well. I never worry about them. I know they are going to show up, I know they are going to be relaxed. They almost always play great."

But Fenson's rink did not play great; Fenson especially did not. If you thought the USCA's qualification rules were complicated, check out this discussion of how curling "accuracy percentage" is determined. Whatever, Fenson's accuracy was scored as 82 percent and 91 percent in games 1 and 2 of the Olympic Trials (compared to 81 percent and 86 percent for opposing skip Shuster). In Game 3, Shuster's accuracy was 94 percent. Fenson's? Forty percent.

After four ends on Sunday in Fargo, it was 11-1. "Stunned silence" is how Rachel Blount of the Minneapolis StarTribune described Scheels Arena after what happened next: Fenson conceded.

"It was like a funeral in here," Shuster told Fenson's hometown Bemidji Pioneer.

Scheels Arena is dead quiet. No cheering, no cowbells, air horns, nothing. That's how stunning Fenson's concession was. #curlingtrials
— Patrick Borzi (@BorzMN) November 17, 2013

"It’s notable that Fenson rallied from 8-3 down after seven ends on Friday," Nick Zaccardi wrote for NBC OlympicTalk. "He must have believed that a 10-point deficit with three more ends to make it up than Friday was too much."

Even then, the Shuster rink wasn't yet through to Sochi.

Eight teams--the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and the United States--vied in a Dec. 10-15 qualification tournament in Fussen, Germany, for two Olympic berths. And if you thought the USCA's qualification rules or the curling accuracy percentage were confusing, get this (from Wikipedia):

In both the men's and the women's tournaments, the teams played a single round robin, and at its conclusion, the top three teams advanced to the playoffs. In the playoffs, the first and second seeds played a game to determine the first team to advance to the main Olympic tournament. The loser of this game, along with the third seed, played a game to determine the second team to advance to the main Olympic tournament.

Except in the men's round robin, four teams finished 5-2. So, in some no-doubt-Byzantine method that is mercifully not explained, it was determined which two 5-2 teams made the playoffs and which two 5-2 teams had to compete in a tie-breaker and then how they would be seeded in the two-game playoffs to determine which two teams would go to the Olympics. 

Shuster's rink and South Korea went to the tie-breaker. In the ninth end, South Korea scored 1 to pull within 6-5. In the 10th, Shuster scored, and his rink was into the finals as the third seed.

Germany, playing at home, beat the Czech Republic in the first qualifier for a berth to Sochi. That meant Shuster's rink in the second qualifier would play the Czech Republic, which had won the team's round-robin game, 9-7. After seven ends, it was 3-2 in favor of the Czechs. But then Shuster scored a stunning 5 in the eighth end. The Czech Republic came back with 2 in the ninth, but Shuster added a score in the 10th, and the 8-5 victory finally had Shuster headed back to the Olympics to see if Sochi 2014 might be a happier experience than had been Vancouver 2010.

In Sunday's Wall Street Journal, Shuster recalled for Brian Costa being "the goat of curling ... the goat of the USA in the Olympics." He talked about wondering whether continuing to pursue curling was worth the sacrifices.

"I just love this sport too dang much, man," Shuster told Costa. "I think I have something to offer to curling still, and our country. I know I do."

Northland curlers John Shuster, Jeff Isaacson, Jared Zezel, John Landsteiner in Sochi today. Reuters pic pic.twitter.com/jomN2HXNuf
— Duluth News Tribune (@duluthnews) February 10, 2014

And then the smiles got harder to come by yet again. After a 7-4 loss Monday to Norway, Shuster (@Shoostie2010) Tweeted of "a struggle today." After a 9-7 loss Tuesday to China, Shuster Tweeted of "a tough day on the ice." Even the HP kicked when he was down.

Who knows what happens now? Team USA plays Germany tomorrow. Given that the Germans are winless and the Americans are currently on the pop side of the playoff bubble, this has to be considered a must win.

But, whatever, today was a good day. Good luck, John Shuster. Sorry for the shot yesterday. Go, Team USA.

Previous reports:

-- XXII Olympic Winter Games, Sochi 2014 (Day 4);

-- XXII Olympic Winter Games, Sochi 2014 (Day 3);

-- XXII Olympic Winter Games, Sochi 2014 (Day 2);

-- XXII Olympic Winter Games, Sochi 2014 (Day 1);

-- XXII Olympic Winter Games, Sochi 2014 (Day 0);

-- XXII Olympic Winter Games, Sochi 2014 (Day a);

-- XII Olympic Winter Games, Innsbruck 1976;

-- II Olympic Winter Games, Saint Moritz 1928, and

-- I Olympic Winter Games, Chamonix 1924.