The Oakland Raiders will be historically bad, but they will win a game.

Some Raiders Fans hope Terrelle Pryor can lift the Raiders
beyond their limited talent.  Most Raiders fans are
hopeing for Jadeveon Clowney or Teddy Bridgewater.

They Raiders will be terrible this year, and they need to be.  They are done patching themselves together with duct tape move and are accepting a year of painful losses in order to build with future draft picks and cap space.  This is a good thing, and well covered by other writers.

What is not being covered (too much) is the Raiders potential to go without a win this season.  Because preseason writing is all about optimism the focus has (rightfully) been on contenders, teams that hope to be contenders, or the juicy struggles of big market teams (see Tebow, Hernandez, and the Jets).  But a few sports writers did mention that they are the best (or worst) shot to go winless since the lions did it in 2008.  Will the Raiders be so bad in 2013 as to not win any games?  

This list is the Raiders schedule and my (completely made up) odds of a raider victory.  By the end of the season I will look back at the odds I gave these teams and laugh, as teams collapse and rise unpredictably.

For as long as Peyton is a Bronco, these games should be hard for Raiders
fans to watch.

At Colts 15%

Vs Jaguars 40%

At Broncos 5%

Vs Washington 10%

Vs Chargers 25%

At Chiefs 10%

Vs Steelers 15%

Vs Eagles 20%

At Giants 5%

At Texans 5%

Vs Titans 20%

At Cowboys 10%

Vs Jets 50%

Vs Chiefs 15%

At Chargers 20%

Vs Broncos 5%

I believe that in the NFL a team always has a 5% chance of pulling an upset (that means that in the worst mismatches Goliath wins 19 out of 20 battles).  Those are not good odds, but every year we see a team like Arizona beat a team like the Patriots (Arizona had an exceptional defense to help pull it off).  I see four such games for the Raiders; At Giants, at Texans, and two against the Broncos.

I see two teams that are almost as bad as Oakland: the Jets and Jaguars.  The Jets still have a great defensive coach and the Jaguars have a great running back, if those games were on the road the Raiders odds of winning would be even lower.

The Chargers also represent a good chance for an Oakland win.  Divisional games are always hard to predict because of familiarity.  Also, I expect the Chargers to be bad.  The Raiders will only need a few lucky breaks to beat the Chargers, and they have two chances to do it.

Every other team somewhere between better than the Raiders, or much better than the Raiders, with various long odds.

Where do my made up odds leave us?
The sum of the percentages converted to decimal is 2.7, saying that I project the raiders to win an average of 2.7 games based on my made up odds (I did the same thing for the 49ers and projected them to win 12.35 games).  Even with their bad projections to win any individual game (the best odds I gave the raiders were 50% at home vs the Jets) 2.7 is a much higher projection than 0.

How hard would it be for the Raiders to win zero games based on my projections?  Pretty damn hard.  If I take the product of the expected losses (1 - projected win percentage) for the entire season the result is the projected odds of a winless season, for the Raiders this is 4.2% (For the 'Niners it was 3.75891E-12, or 3 out of a hundred billion).

So if you are looking to bet that the Raiders are not going to win a game, you should only take that bet if you think the Raiders odds of losing each game is significantly worse than my meager evaluations, or your returns are 20 to 1 or better (20 to 1 returns would be equal to a 5% chance of occurring, greater returns than the odds I outlined).

The Prediction:  The Raiders win less than four games but more than 0 (aka they finish with 1, 2, or 3 wins).

When this is your picture of a franchise QB you may be in
for some lean years.