Mike Shanahan seemed serious when he said Al Davis liked Lane Kiffin better.

Sure, Davis fired both coaches four games into their respective and ultimately futile second seasons in silver and black. And, yes, Davis says he will not pay Kiffin the remainder of his contract, much the same as Shanahan has long claimed Davis reneged on monies owed him.

The difference between 1989 and 2008? Shanahan said Kiffin had 34 more days of work as Raiders coach despite winning three fewer games than Shanahan.

"I really," said a stone-faced Shanahan, "don't think it's fair."

Shanahan was joking, of course, and it was a real knee slapper that lacked only canned laughter.

But what has been proven time and again to be anything but funny in NFL circles is the in-season coaching change.

Instead of being an elixir to jump-start a team midstream for oft-impetuous owners, it serves more as a white flag on the season. According to former Dallas Cowboys executive Gil Brandt, there have been 69 in-season coaching changes since 1960, including the recently fired duo of Kiffin in Oakland and Scott Linehan in St. Louis, and Mike Nolan's seat is growing warmer in San Francisco.

Care to guess how many of those 69 in-season switches culminated with a championship campaign? One. Way back in 1961, when Wally Lemm replaced Lou Rymkus after a 1-3-1 start and led the old Houston Oilers to their second consecutive American Football League title.

"Sometimes you say, hey, you have to make a change," Brandt said. "But I guess, most of the time, when you take a team over like that, it's not (a very good) team to begin with. You have those kind of statistics to back it up."

These are the kinds of steep odds Tom Cable faces today as he debuts as Oakland's interim coach in New Orleans.

Ten in-season coaching changes have taken place since 2000, not counting Oakland and St. Louis this year, and the successive coaches (18-42) have run up the same putrid winning percentage (.300) as the coaches (30-70) they replaced to close out that season.

So where's the success you'd think would come with such a shock-and-awe switch? This isn't major league baseball and its marathon 162-game season, where a managerial move this season from Willie Randolph to Cordova High School's Jerry Manuel helped propel the New York Mets into contention, and the Milwaukee Brewers rode the emotion of replacing Ned Yost with Dale Sveum with 12 games remaining into the playoffs.

"The game is so much different," Brandt said, alluding to the NFL's relatively brief 16-game regular season. "When somebody comes in like that, they try to establish a different system, and that goes back to training camp. It's hard to change … sometimes there's a losing attitude established.

"But I really think Cable will do a good job."

If going 7-5 is considered as such, Cable can look to former Raiders coach Art Shell, who, in his first tour of duty when the franchise was in Los Angeles, got the Raiders to a respectable 8-8 final mark after Shanahan's dismissal following a 1-3 start in 1989.

The payoff came a year later, when the Shell-led Raiders went 12-4 and advanced to the AFC championship game.

In fact, the Raiders now have made four in-season coaching changes since their inception in 1960. The cross-bay 49ers, who began play in 1950, have made two (see chart).

Recent expansion teams Baltimore, Houston, Jacksonville and Carolina never have made an in-season coaching change, nor has Dallas, which opened up shop in 1960.

Green Bay, which began play one year after the NFL, in 1921, has changed coaches in season just once, in 1953.

By comparison, Arizona, a 1920 charter member of the NFL when the franchise was in Chicago; San Diego, a 1960 AFL original; and Atlanta, a 1966 expansion club, have done it six teams each, the last changes occurring in the 2000, 1998 and 2007 seasons, respectively.

Of course, there are many reasons for switches, ranging from retirements (Marion Campbell, Atlanta, 1989) to firings (Sam Rutigliano, Cleveland, 1984) to health reasons (Mike Martz, St. Louis, 2005) to "retirements," such as George Halas, who left the Chicago Bears in 1942 to join the Navy in World War II. It is the only time the Bears have experienced an in-season coaching change.

Call The Bee's Paul Gutierrez, (916) 326-5556.