Perhaps the most telling observation on the seemingly never-ending sad saga playing out with the Oakland Raiders came from a San Francisco Chronicle reader responding online Sept. 30 to the news that team owner Al Davis had fired 33-year-old coach Lane Kiffin after 20 games and a 5-15 record.

''I would love to have someone to root for in this soap opera,'' the reader wrote, ``but I can't find anyone.''

There was a time when the Raiders had every right to proudly trumpet their signature expressions -- ''Pride and Poise'' and ''Commitment To Excellence.'' This was a franchise that made the Super Bowl as recently as the 2002 season and won three Super Bowls in a seven-year span from 1977 to 1984. But the Raiders haven't been to the playoffs in the past five seasons and seem destined to make it six in a row after a 1-3 start.

The man in charge from Day One in 1960 has been Davis, 79, once considered the smartest man in the football room as a visionary in the old American Football League and one of the principal architects in the historic merger of the AFC and the far more established NFL.

Davis then became an anti-establishment pain in the rear end for his constant litigation against the league over his various moves from Oakland to Los Angeles and back to Oakland. His antics were among the principal reasons the late Pete Rozelle decided to take an early retirement from the commissioner's office in 1989. He was sick and very tired of spending too many of his days in a courtroom, and he and Davis had a mutual hate-hate relationship for years.

If you watched the news conference announcing Kiffin's firing 12 days ago, you saw Davis as a cranky, finger-pointing grumpy old man making a rare public appearance to viciously denounce a man he'd made the youngest head coach in league history less than two years ago. Davis said that Kiffin's dismissal ``didn't have anything to do with winning. It had to do with personality. It's the first time I ever let anyone go based on what I call just being a flat-out liar.''

Kiffin, banned from the building, viewed that sorry session on television and told ESPN that day that ``I had a real sick feeling watching it. It was just real painful, hard to watch. I'm kind of embarrassed for him.''

Kiffin was no angel in any of this, going public several times himself with complaints about Davis' meddling that countless Raiders head coaches had moaned about, though mostly in private. A few weeks before the draft last April, Kiffin said of Davis, ``He's kind of the general manager, director of college scouting, director of pro personnel and sometimes the defensive coordinator.''

It was not the smartest thing for a novice head coach to say unless he was deviously plotting his own exit strategy, including the payoff of a $2 million a year contract that was set to run out after the 2009 season.

Davis said at his bizarre and often rambling news conference that he had ''just cause'' to fire Kiffin and wouldn't pay. A league-appointed arbitrator will have the final say, though how could anyone not expect Davis to drag any decision through the courts for as long as possible if the ruling doesn't go his way.

To his credit, Davis at least had blamed no one but himself for hiring Kiffin, one of seven head coaches Davis has employed since 1995, a reign of error perhaps unrivaled in the recent history of the league.

While Davis can't seem to get it right with his own franchise, he's clearly been a great boon for several other teams.

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