Aug 17th 2008 9:57AM by Ryan Wilson (author feed)
Filed under: Raiders, AFC WestTwo weeks ago, a few days after Javon Walker admitted that Raiders owner Al Davis had to talk him out of retirement, head coach Lane Kiffin acknowledged that he was worried about the team’s No. 1 wideout (who had just signed a six-year, $55 million deal and recently suffered a Vegas beatdown).

Walker assuaged those concerns by announcing that he was just joshing with all the retirement talk and is fully committed to the Raiders.

And while Walker has shown glimpses of why the team brought him to Oakland, Kiffin would like to see more. Specifically, he’d like Walker to start earning his pay, which implies that to date, that hasn’t been happening. Kiffin didn’t think the Raiders got their money’s worth from Walker in Friday’s 17-16 exhibition-game loss at Tennessee. He had a drop on the third play of the game, just as he did in the first exhibition game against the 49ers.

“There’s a couple of balls there that we would have liked him to come up with,” Kiffin said during the opening statement of his teleconference Saturday. “That’s discouraging because he was paid an awful lot of money, paid like one of the top five receivers in the NFL. We need him to make those plays.” Just so we’re clear, Lane, what do you think of Walker’s performance?

The ’s David White points out that Kiffin has been criticizing Walker since the Raiders signed him, and if history is any guide, Mikes Sherman and Shanahan think this will be a recurring theme in Walker’s Oakland career.