Tim Brown clarifies comments on former Raiders coach Bill Callahan
Former Raiders great Tim Brown joined the show to clarify his remarks about then-coach Bill Callahan and the Raiders’ Super Bowl loss to the Buccaneers.
“I’ve never said [Callahan] sabotaged the game,” Brown said. “That’s something that can never be proven. We can never go into the mind of Bill Callahan. …. I should have said we could have called it sabotage. It was a question, not a statement. You cannot prove it.”
Brown said it wasn’t just the Super Bowl gameplan. Brown said there were a series of events that led to this.
Brown said that it made sense for the Raiders, whose offensive line averaged 350 pounds, to try to run on the lighter Bucs defensive line.
But then on Friday the Raiders coaching staff changed the gameplan on Friday morning. “We all were concerned about it,” Brown said. “It was a drastic change.”
Brown said he was Callahan’s protector and he never had a cross word with his former coach.
Brown said that the Bucs knew all their audible calls … in part because they went back to the old offense. “If you go back to the old gameplan on Friday,” Brown said, “you don’t have time to change your calls.”
Brown said that he speculates that Oakland center Barrett Robbins had a hard time with the pressure he was going to be under with a new gameplan and that may have contributed to his breakdown.
Brown also said that he was only telling this story now because he was talking about Robbins. He said this story was not new. “The crazy thing is I’ve spoken about this for 10 years,” Brown said.