Travis Taylor, the free agent quietly signed by the Raiders Tuesday, has more career receptions and yards than any wide receiver on the roster.

Taylor, a first-round draft pick by Baltimore in 2000, has 311 receptions for 4,103 yards and 22 touchdowns. Jerry Porter is second with 240 catches for 3,234 yards and 24 touchdowns.

Curtis Brown, an undrafted running back from Brigham Young, was also added to the roster. Brown averaged 5.0 yards per carry or better all three years with the Cougars. Over the past two seasons, Brown gained 2,133 yards on 411 carries and caught 115 passes for 1,020 yards.

When Rich Snead is announced as a member of the Raiders player personnel department, don’t expect his first order of business to be the signing of wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson.

Unless I’m reading the situation completely wrong, Johnson is a bad fit for the Raiders on more than one level.

Johnson is an “X” receiver, or split end, in coach Lane Kiffin’s system. Jerry Porter will be the feature receiver at “Z,” or flanker.

This past offseason, Oakland re-signed leading receiver Ronald Curry, a classic physical “X.” They recently traded for Mike Williams, another “X’ who will be given the chance by Kiffin to resurrect his career.

Doug Gabriel can play both spots, although he is most comfortable outside.

If Williams doesn’t work out and Curry were to get injured _ two reasonable scenarios _ Johnson could suddenly pique the interest of Kiffin and Al Davis.

Except for one thing _ money. Johnson has made it clear he wants money befitting his status as one of the elite receivers in the NFL. Johnson firmly believes this, even though his last three employers _ Tampa Bay, Dallas and Carolina _ have said, `Thanks, but no thanks.”

“I’m not playing for $750,000, $850,000, $1 million or $2.5 million,” Johnson said. “You can write that down.”

Assume someone in the lonely Raiders personnel department has done just that.

The Raiders dumped Randy Moss because of performance and chemistry issues. Johnson has never been accused of flat-out dogging it, as Moss has, but neither has he covered himself in glory from the team aspect.

Kiffin, whose father Monte is the Bucs defensive coordinator, knows all the details of Johnson’s messy divorce with Tampa Bay and Jon Gruden. Carolina let Johnson go in part because they didn’t see him as a mentor figure for new draft pick Dwayne Jarrett.

The Raiders have Porter back on track, do they want to add Johnson to the mix?

One last chemistry issue has to do with Warren Sapp, Johnson’s former teammate in Tampa. The two men can’t stand each other. In one of his frequent bull sessions with reporters last season, Sapp was unsparing in his assessment of Johnson as a me-first player. In a recent NFL Network special about Tampa Bay’s Super Bowl season, he hammered Johnson again.

Most every move the Raiders have made of late has been about getting younger and starting over. Signing a player for one last good year isn’t part of the plan.

Tyler Brayton is, if anything, a good company man.

A defensive end and tackle by trade in college at Colorado, he moved to outside linebacker to suit Rob Ryan’s vision of a 3-4 defense.

Predictably, Brayton was out of place attempting to cover running backs in pass coverage, and by the end of his second season there, had begun to play end in passing situations. Last year, at training camp, he was the fulltime end, replacing Bobby Hamilton as the starter.

He is praised by coaches and teammates for his work habits and practice intensity, but all the character traits in the world can’t make up for going 15 games with zero sacks.

At the Raiders mandatory minicamp, Brayton has played exclusively inside at tackle _ a role he found out about upon arrival. Kevin Huntley is getting most of the reps at right end, with Derrick Burgess at left end.

The second team ends have been two rookie draft picks, Quintin Moses (third round) and Jay Richardson (fifth round).

“I guess when they drafted the two young guys, they figured we had plenty of defensive ends so they said they’d move me down just for this minicamp,” Brayton said. “We’ll see.”

Angular for an interior lineman at 6-foot-6, 280 pounds, Brayton concedes he’ll need to put on a few pounds of the change becomes permanent.

“End is a little less stressful, as far as playing the run, but hopefully I can outquick some of those guys in the middle,” Brayton said.

Coach Lane Kiffin said the plan was to let Brayton play at tackle for at least five practices to so they could make a decision where he would play.

“Sometimes if you go back and forth, you don’t get an idea whether a guy can play the highest level at that spot,” Kiffin said.

Saturday news and notes:

– College officials were hired to work the second practice and Kiffin said it will continue.

“Any penalties _ throw ‘em all,” Kiffin said. “Do your stats in the last five years and the Raiders are 32nd out of 32 teams in penalties. They’re out here for a reason.”

Kiffin said he does not believe in conspiracy theories.

“That won’t be our thinking. We don’t think the officials throw more flags because we wear certain jerseys,” Kiffin said. “We’re going to play at the standards we’re taught. We’re going to do things right and we’re going to lower the penalties by doing that. We’re going to have officials out here as much we can so our guys get a realistic look at it.”

– Barry Sims and Robert Gallery traded sides for a few series, with Sims working on the left and Gallery on the right during the morning session. Gallery, however, continued to get most of his work on the left side.

– Jerry Porter, who was complaining he hadn’t gotten any passes from JaMarcus Russell during team sessions Friday morning, got his wish Saturday. Russell rolled to his right and found Porter racing toward the sideline. The pass slammed into Porter’s body with a thud as he made the catch.

– Josh McCown was easily the sharpest of the three quarterbacks Saturday morning, making a number of nice throws both in drills and team sessions.

– Darnell Bing, playing the strong safety position as he did in college at USC, reached around James Adkisson and poked the ball loose during the team session. Bing said he stayed between 216 and 218 pounds last season no matter how hard he tried to bulk up.

– Kiffin termed Russell’s second day “much more relaxed” and said he saw improvement.

“Things came easier even though we had more plays in,” Kiffin said. “He looked closer to the guy we saw before. We knew that would happen. There will be a lot of baby steps.”

– Those who did not practice because of injury included TE Tony Stewart, (heel) WR Mike Williams (hamstring), RB Justin Fargas (shoulder), C Adam Treu (quad), WR Johnathan Holland (shoulder) and FB Justin Griffith (ankle).

Holland, injured Friday, will be out at least three weeks.

– After shipping Moss and his nearly $12 million salary cap figure to New England for a net savings of more than $7.7 million. Oakland finds itself with $12.8 million in cap space. The Raiders have the seventh-most cap room in the NFL.

They’ve even got more room than the 49ers, who have about $10.5 million in space.

– Warren Sapp currently has the highest cap number on the Raiders ($6,397,000), followed by Gallery ($5,472,428), LaMont Jordan ($5,401,440) and safety Michael Huff ($4,805,760).

– Based on pro-rated bonus and acceleration, the two hardest Raiders to cut or trade are Jerry Porter and Sims. Porter’s exit would mean an immediate cap hit of $3.29 million, with Sims costing approximately $3.16 million.

– The Raiders have a reasonable total of $7,965,200 in “dead money” on their payroll, which is actually less than the combined total of more than $8 million they had left over on the 2006 payroll from the Rich Gannon and Kerry Collins deals.

(Note: The actual figure in dead money is about $9.2 million, as pointed out by a poster below. It still puts the Raiders in much better shape, cap-wise, than they have been in several years).

Under a much smaller cap, Oakland had more than $12 million in dead money last year from deals with Gannon, Collins, Ted Washington, Ron Stone and Teyo Johnson.

Moss counts for the more than half the figure ($4,043,940), followed by Brad Badger ($1,434,260), Bobby Hamilton ($1,260,000), Aaron Brooks ($1,000,000), Danny Clark ($861,000) and Tyrone Poole ($625,000).

Translation?

There is plenty of room to sign Russell, and getting picks to camp on time has never been a problem before.

Even if the speculation that the Raiders are cash-strapped by NFL standards is true, guaranteeing scheduled bonus money over the first few years of the deal would alleviate that problem.

When he met with the press Friday evening, Russell was asked if he was concerned about the possibility of a holdout _ a wildly premature question considering it seems most teams don’t even begin serious negotiations until the Fourth of July.

C’mon, you really have no idea.

And neither do I.

Good grade, bad grade. No one’s going to remember or care in a few years when we have a better feel for which picks turned out to be players and which one didn’t.

To hear Lane Kiffin talk, it was as if the Raiders targeted 11 players and got them all. A miracle.

Odds are slim that was the case. Someone they wanted went to someone else, but Kiffin knows the drill. He was a recruiting coordinator, with plenty of experience at the “We got everyone we wanted” speech to the media.

The 2007 draft, of course, will some day be determined by JaMarcus Russell. If he’s great, the draft is great. If he’s a bust, the draft won’t be much better.

My gut feeling is it was a pretty good draft. That’s the same gut, by the way, that thought Kevin Boothe was a throwaway pick in the sixth round last year, and wondered if Matt Leinart was no more than a Ken Dorsey because he was a so-so talent playing on a great team.

There were guys at the gym this morning who had seen maybe 1 percent of the total draft class on television or in person games speaking with authority on who did well and who didn’t.

It will be nice to see players actually on the field this weekend, but with no contact, we really won’t begin to make any real assessments until Napa when players get in pads.

Remember Paul McQuistan? He was a combination of Steve Wisniewski and Kevin Gogan when they suited up for minicamps last year. He lasted two games before giving way to Boothe, a guy I ranked 53rd of 53 players on this blog.

You make a guess. You live with it.

That’s the draft in a nutshell.