Snap Judgments: For Kiffin, no shame in getting fired by Raiders

Lane Kiffin lasted 20 games with the Raiders, the same stint as Mike Shanahan, who went on to thrive in his coaching career. Ed Wolfstein/Icon SMI Don Banks's Mailbag Submit a comment or question to Don Banks. Name: Email: Hometown: Question: SEND Follow Don Banks on Twitter

Lane Kiffin's long-anticipated firing this week instantly bestowed him membership in the ever-growing ranks of ex-Raiders head coaches, and there's certainly no shame in that.

I mean, think about it. There are worse things to be known as. Even better for Kiffin, who's only 33, he's the youngest member of that particular club, giving him years and years to enjoy the distinction and, potentially, profit from it.

Consider the happy fates of so many others who have been fortunate enough to leave the employment of Al Davis and his silver-and-black band of brothers:

-- John Madden has gone on to become an almost ubiquitous figure in American pop culture, setting the standard for the athlete/coach turned broadcaster in all ways, not the least of which has been his singular niche as the nation's leading overexposed commercial pitchman (although Peyton Manning seems determined to give him a run for his advertising money). There are household names, and then there's Madden.

-- Mike Shanahan has done quite nicely for himself as well. Once he rid himself of his own 20-game Raiders coaching imprimatur, he went on to win one Super Bowl title as the offensive coordinator for the 1994 San Francisco 49ers, and two more in 1997-98 as the coach in Denver, where he is currently in his 14th season. That makes him second only to Tennessee's Jeff Fisher in terms of continuous NFL coaching tenure with one franchise.

-- Jon Gruden caught one of the last flights out of Oakland before the franchise descended into complete irrelevance and disarray and one year later earned a Super Bowl ring for himself and his team in Tampa Bay -- becoming something of a sneering Madison Avenue darling in the process. As hard as it is to believe, Gruden's already in his seventh season with the Bucs, making him the third-most tenured coach in the NFC. He trails only soon-to-be ex-Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren and Philadelphia's Andy Reid, and is tied with Carolina's John Fox.

-- Norv Turner's head coaching career wasn't derailed by the two-year sentence he served in Oakland. Turner is now in his second season in San Diego, and the talented Chargers have as much claim as anyone this season to the role of AFC Super Bowl favorite. Turner is 15-8 in his first 23 games with San Diego, earning two playoff wins last January for a franchise that hadn't won a postseason game since 1994.

-- Even Davis himself is an ex-Raiders head coach who has fared pretty well after his three-year stint (1963-65) on the sideline. He does own the team after all, as Raiders fans might have been prone to recall a time or two during the course of the franchise's disastrous past five years. For a guy who first showed up in Oakland in January 1963 -- during the Kennedy administration -- that's 45 years of staying power.

So the last thing Kiffin should do is despair that his Raiders days are done and over with. He got his 20 games, it didn't go well, but that's that. Who knows? Maybe some day in the decades to come, he'll have a popular video game named in his honor, and football fans will rush out en masse to buy Kiffin '22. What? Would it have sounded any more ridiculous if we had predicted the same thing for Madden in 1979?

• The other thing that struck me this week was that the Rams and Raiders -- those old relocation-loving NFL twins -- were linked once again when they both fired their coaches within a day of each other.

The Rams asked Scott Linehan to turn in his building ID badge on Monday after a 36-game stint calling the shots, and Kiffin got the word in a less-than-courtesy phone call from Davis on Tuesday. The twin dismissals were the NFL's earliest coaching firings in two decades, coming just four games into the 2008 season.

It brought back memories of the Rams and Raiders packing up and leaving Los Angeles together in the spring of 1995, with Georgia Frontiere's team headed for greener pastures in St. Louis and Davis kissing and making up with the city of Oakland, from whence the Raiders had come 13 years earlier.

The irony of all ironies, of course, is that if you believe what you hear, the Rams and Raiders could have their eye on a move back to Los Angeles at some point in the coming three years.

The Rams and Raiders are among the very few NFL teams that have hired the same head coach twice, a feat the Rams have, remarkably enough, repeated more than once.

Everybody remembers that the Rams had two Chuck Knox eras (1973-77, 1992-94), but often overlooked is that George Allen (1966-70) was re-hired in 1978, but subsequently fired just two games into the preseason that year. As for the Raiders, Davis had Art Shell replace Shanahan after four games of the 1989 season, fired him after the 1994 season, then brought him back for 2006's memorable 2-14 fiasco. Kiffin replaced Shell in 2007.