What the Raiders Fans are Saying About Aaron Curry

The following isn't an essay on Aaron Curry or the Oakland Raiders' fan base so much as it is on desperate rationalization - the need to believe that mountains of unpleasant news or unfavorable evidence can somehow be turned in your favor by a single unsupported, unsupportable, unfalsifiable hypothesis.

Those big words give way too much credit to the hilarious crap that some Raiders fans are pulling right now. They want to make their new LB acquisition, Aaron Curry, look like a good move and are pulling out all the stops to do it. Most of it involves taking Curry's elite skillz for granted and brandishing all kinds of unrelated criticisms on Seattle's front office, hoping to make them look like just the pack of stooges that would release a burgeoning Hall-of-Famer.

In fairness to Oakland, this phenomenon is not unique to the Bay Area. I remember Seahawks fans rationalizing about Greg Knapp when he came to Seattle for the 2009 season as offensive coordinator. Nobody wanted to believe the simplest implication of his body of work - that Seattle was in for a year of unimaginative, ineffective, laughably bad play-calling - so they set about searching for a reason to believe. Untenable speculation, excuses, dismissals, contradictions of fact, all in an attempt to shed better light on Knapp.

So, before we start making fun of Raiders fans over their Curry-squirming, let's remember that we're not immune to that tendency. We're all sports fans. We all want reason to hope. Some stoic churls like myself excluded, every one of us is looking for the silver lining that might, just might, flash into a glorious clear sky.

Now then, to the good part. Some examples (courtesy of Sadhappy at Seahawks.net) and my rebuttals in Seahawks blue:

"your coaching staff is overvaluing K.J. Wright"
You would need to prove that Curry has outplayed Wright in order to have any kind of respectability behind that.

"Curry is simply not one of 'Carrolls boys'."
Neither was Lofa Tatupu, Lendale White, or Lawrence Jackson, I guess.
"the way he was handled in Seattle by the coaching staff that Curry was thinking too much on the field instead of just playing"
I've seen that excuse floated in Seattle, too. But how hard does a #4 LB have to think to make a basic open-field tackle?