Raiders invade Canton as Branch, Seymour are inducted

By Case Keefer (contact)

Saturday, Aug. 6, 2022 | 2 a.m.

CANTON, Ohio — Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis reveled in his team’s prominence at last year’s Pro Football Hall of Fame Enshrinement Weekend.

Davis was on hand for all the events celebrating the pair of Raider inductees, cornerback Charles Woodson and coach/quarterback Tom Flores. Davis thanked then-Pro Football Hall of Fame President David Baker after the ceremony at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium, but also had one last pointed message.

“We’ve only got one more to go,” Davis told Baker.

He was referring to legendary 1970s-80s Raiders receiver Cliff Branch, who gets the due Davis has long believed he deserved this morning. Davis will present Branch, who died in 2019, for induction in this year’s ceremony starting at 9 a.m. and airing on NFL Network.

Branch will go into the Hall of Fame alongside a more modern former Raider: defensive tackle Richard Seymour, who played his final four seasons in Silver and Black after winning three Super Bowls with the New England Patriots.

The Raiders now count 30 former players as part of the Hall of Fame; the Hall of Fame lists only 24. The discrepancy comes from six inductees — Ron Mix, Eric Dickerson, Ronnie Lott, Bob Brown, Rod Woodson and Jerry Rice — who mostly played elsewhere before spending a short time at the end of their careers with the team.

Either way, that puts the Raiders as one of the top five most-represented NFL teams in the Hall of Fame.

That’s not bad for a franchise whose fans famously accuse, and rally around, establishments like the Hall of Fame and the NFL itself for conspiring against it. Despite the recent rash of honorees, that inclination hasn’t changed — especially not with the method of some of their inclusions.

Branch got in via the Hall of Fame’s senior committee 32 years after his first eligibility, the same route that delivered Flores after a 22-year wait.

Raiders’ fans swarmed Canton for enshrinement week, and even broke out a couple faint “Rai-ders” chants around the Hall of Fame museum Thursday afternoon. But underneath the merriment, there was still some resentment for the wait players like Branch endured.

“It’s just nice having them in the Hall of Fame for the most part,” said Justin Wilson, a lifelong Raiders fan who now lives in Bismarck, N.D. “But it shows you can’t knock the Raiders no matter what you do. You can go ahead and push them back all you want, but they’re just going to come back harder.”

Wilson brought his teenage son, Tristan Wilson, to Canton for enshrinement week festivities. As they walked through the museum, Justin Wilson told his son about how Branch “would kill people with speed.” A “Speed Kills #21” sign was part of Branch’s locker display set up for the current inductees, where longtime Raider fan David Griffiths posed for a picture.

Griffiths, a Woodlands, Calif., native who was a Raiders season-ticket holder in the 1990s, was thrilled with all the Raiders memorabilia at the Hall of Fame but still believes the team doesn’t get enough respect.

“They push our players back,” Griffiths said. “Branch got pushed back a little bit. Ken Stabler (eligible in 1989, inducted in 2016) got pushed back a lot of bit. I think it’s true. That’s what they do.”

The Raiders have campaigned for Branch to get in for years. Davis, who called Branch his best friend and served as his agent, has always considered him one of the Raiders’ greatest all-time players. Teammate and mentor Fred Biletnikoff, who was inducted in the Hall of Fame in 1988 in his fifth year of eligibility, has publicly said Branch was every bit as deserving as himself.

Branch reached four Pro Bowls, all of them from 1974 to 1977, and played on all three Raider Super Bowl-winning teams. In 1974, he led the NFL with 1,092 receiving yards and 13 touchdowns.

He exemplified the way late Raiders owner Al Davis, a Hall of Famer himself, wanted to play as a downfield vertical threat.

Seymour was another Al Davis favorite, as the owner pushed to trade for the veteran prior to the 2009 season to fix the Raiders’ foundering run defense.

The Raiders’ rush defense improved each of the next two seasons with Seymour in the middle, and then Al Davis made him the highest-paid defensive player in the NFL at the time with a two-year, $30 million deal.

“He was a great leader,” Seymour said of Al Davis. “I was able to learn so much from him just in terms of attention to detail and his will to win. He was a coach, a commissioner. You know what he’s meant to the game of football. And, as the mantra goes, ‘Once a Raider, always a Raider.’ So, I valued my time there. I was able to take all the lessons I learned with my Patriots career and really be able to share that knowledge and wisdom and insight.”

Seymour continued to play at a high level as he completed his contract with the Raiders, but he decided to retire after the 2012 season after he didn’t receive an offer he felt was worthy of his return.

Current Raiders coach Josh McDaniels was on the Patriots’ offensive staff during each of Seymour’s eight seasons in New England. McDaniels called the defensive tackle “a great human being.”

“As a player, I remember practices where we would have to make sure we knew on the script which plays he was in there for, and which plays he was not in there for, because if he was in there for every play, practice would have been a mess for (the offense),” McDaniels said. “And so, we kind of had to pick and choose our battles, and he was just a really difficult guy to block. He lined up all over the front and could be very disruptive at nose, three-technique and in pass rush and the run game. It was just very difficult to handle him.”

Seymour’s initial exhibit at the Hall of Fame is split between Patriots and Raiders memorabilia — in addition to gear from the University of Georgia, where he was an All-American in college.

The current Raiders got a chance to tour the Hall of Fame on Wednesday and see all the team’s included history.

Among the most prominent placements in the museum is a wall with a picture of Al Davis declaring the Raiders the “team of the decades” for posting the NFL’s best record from 1963 to 1992. Art Shell has a couple different spots, one noting him as the first Black NFL head coach with the Raiders in 1989 and another with an old jersey hanging from his days as a standout offensive lineman from 1968 to 1982.

It might have taken some of the players longer than fans would have preferred to be included, but the Raiders are undeniably ubiquitous in the country’s biggest shrine to pro football.

“I’ve got a lot of Raider pictures going on,” Justin Wilson said. “It’s nice to see us finally get that respect. I just can’t wait to see more get in, more deserving ones.”

Case Keefer can be reached at 702-948-2790 or [email protected]. Follow Case on Twitter at twitter.com/casekeefer.Case Keefer can be reached at 702-948-2790 or