“Just win, baby.”

Has there ever been a better slogan in professional sports?

Has there ever been a slogan that gets right to the heart of what we are as a society?

These words are a battle cry directly from the lips of Oakland Raiders franchise owner Al Davis, who passed away this past Saturday at age 82.

Davis and his commitment to excellence was so strong, there has been speculation amongst those who knew him best that he was studying game film at the time of his passing.

“Just win, baby.”

Along with having a  commitment to excellence, Davis was a legend among those with any knowledge of the NFL’s history accomplishing many things in his amazing life that we take for granted today.

He was a successful professional football coach, and NFL owner, but to focus on just that misses the point; frankly it only skims the surface.

His Raiders always seemed to carry his persona, the outlaw team, the team that played with an attitude before anyone had ever heard of the term.

He always dressed in black, as if he were some executive version of a biker, the guy always riding against the wind.

Davis was able to get the Raiders to become an extension of him-self, a team that always seemed to be flaunting its anti-establishment image.

“Just win, baby.”

It also helped that he was running the Raiders in the right era. His team became the outsiders dressed all in black at a time when the counterculture almost seemed to be invading the country.

At a time when kids seemed to be growing long hair and rebelling against the “Leave it to Beaver” (ask your parents) mind-set of the 1950s, here were Raiders like Kenny Stabler and Jack Tatum, looking as if they had just stepped out of some biker bar.

Add a general manager whose sense of fashion came from a Johnny Cash album cover and you have the Oakland Raiders we all know today;  with their own image and their own culture, the ultimate outsiders.

Davis became the coach of the Raiders when he was 33, and even then had the look he would become famous for, the slicked-back hair, the shades, the attitude, these made Davis stand out from the crowd.

However, it wasn’t just his look that changed the NFL as we know it.

As commissioner of the AFL during a time when the professional football was split into two separate leagues, Davis worked to have the champions of both the NFL and AFL play for a winner-take-all title, which later became known as the Super Bowl.

But the biggest impact he had was as a person who opened doors for others in the NFL.

Davis was the first executive to draft an African-American quarterback in the first round, taking Eldridge Dickey in 1968.

He also hired the first Mexican-American Head Coach in NFL history, Tom Flores, as well as the first African-American Head Coach of the modern era, Art Shell.

In recent years, Davis entrusted much of the organization's operations to Amy Trask, who became the first female CEO of an NFL franchise.

His willingness to challenge the league on numerous fronts, going back to his days as AFL commissioner, opened the door for well-known Arkansan Jerry Jones to change the way the league does business.

In the end, it's very difficult to measure just what Davis has meant to the NFL over the last half-century. But one thing's for sure: There are those who are benefitting from his impact everywhere in football today.

In a game where too many executives all seem to come off the same assembly line, a game that keeps getting more and more corporate all the time, Davis was truly different.

In a game that went from something only played on Sunday afternoons in the fall to the most popular game in the country, Davis was an iconic figure.

“Just win, baby.”

Davis understood that, ultimately, that’s all that mattered. Not if people liked him. Not if his team spit at conventions. He understood that none of it mattered except the scoreboard.

Davis understood both football’s soul, and America’s, too.