Oakland Raiders: The 5 Greatest Players of All Time

Though the Oakland Raiders’ recent history is the essence of putridity, they have a long and storied history of success mainly with outcasts and madmen.  As their eccentric and posthumous Managing General Partner (even if you’re a Raider-hater, you gotta love that title) Al Davis would often boast, the Raiders had the highest winning percentage of any professional sports franchise from 1967-1985.

But what makes the Oakland Raiders one of the NFL's storied franchises are colorful knicknames of their players (The Snake, the Mad-Stork, The Intimidator, Lester-the-Molester to name a few), and the plays that have gone down in NFL historical anals (The Immaculate Reception, The Sea of Hands, The Holy Roller and The ghost to the Post).

Longtime NFL Films narrator John Facenda personified the Raider mystique best in “The Autumn Wind,” which Raider Nation has adopted as it theme song:

His face is weather beaten.
He wears a hooded sash,
With a silver hat about his head,
And a bristling black mustache.

The beauty of any best of list is the debates sparked by who was left off the list.  Knowing this, I thank the detractors in advance for your outrage for leaving off any Raider who was prominent during their 13-year experiment in Los Angeles.

With that being said, the list is a combination of a number of factors:

1)      The players contribution to the Raider mystique:

2)      Hall-of-Fame Career:

3)      Pro-football-reference’s Approximate Value (AV):  “an attempt to put a single number on the seasonal value of a player at any position from any year (since 1950),” according to pro-footballreference.com founder Doug Drinen.

SOURCES:

https://linkonym.appspot.com/?http://http://www.footballnation.com/content/oakland-raiders-the-5-greatest-players-all-time/30390/www.pro-football-reference.com/teams/rai/career-av.htm