It depends on how you look at it. I thought University of Southern California Athletic Director Mike Garrett was out of his mind when he insisted on paying Pete Carroll over one million dollars a year when he was hired. Carroll was actively pursuing the job while all who were offered it were politely turning them down and Carroll likely would have accepted just about any contract offered at that time by Garrett and USC. Now reports are that Garrett and USC are paying Lane Kiffin around four million dollars a year and the outrage in the national media is palpable.

Sure it is easy to play Monday morning quarterback and sit here three years later and say it was a mistake. However, unlike all the pundits who are currently talking about what a mistake it was, I am going to tell you why I think it happened and how it could have been avoided at that time. Many teams in the NFL, when selecting players, still place too much emphasis on the physical side of the equation and not nearly enough on the mental side. The Raiders appear to be among the worst mental evaluators of them all, making me wonder if they do any mental evaluations prior to making their selections. In this article which tries to name the top 10 Raider draft picks of all-time, not one player on the list was drafted before 1988! It’s unrealistic to think any player drafted in the past five or six years would have already made the list, but ZERO out of the previous 22-years seems to defy the odds even more.