There’s no question that Jon Gruden’s relationship with Khalil Mack’s agent soured over the few months they were in contact, but according to former Raiders voice Greg Papa, it wasn’t Gruden’s presence that pushed the Raiders to trade Mack.
Papa believes the real reason Mack wasn’t given a new contract was because Davis couldn’t comfortably afford to pay the guaranteed money.
“[Jon Gruden] is not why they decided not to pay Khalil Mack,” Papa said Tuesday on his 95.7 The Game radio show. “They could not pay Mack. Does the owner have $90 million laying around the office? They knew they couldn’t pay him in February. Looking back, they should have traded him last March.”
Back in August, Papa talked about the Aaron Donald deal and said he knew it might be a problem when he saw the guaranteed money that came with Donald’s new deal.
“Friday changed my perspective knowing how [the Raiders] think and when Aaron Donald’s deal came in, it’s so much higher than Von Miller’s… it just changed everything. So the question you have to ask, could the Raiders have signed Khalil Mack and should the Raiders have signed Khalil Mack? There are two distinctly different questions there… Could the ownership have put $90 million into an escrow account to sign him?”
Maybe we’ll never know who was most responsible for letting Mack slip away, but the consensus has always been that Gruden made the call… but maybe there was a little more to the story than that.
twitter: @raidersbeat
It seems Greg Papa can’t stop talking about the Raiders at this point and is trying to stay relevant in any Raiders discussion to me. To say Mark Davis couldn’t pay Mack seems like a stretch. Mark could have EASILY got a loan to pay Mack. It seems like Papa is still bugged by the fact that he was fired. It seems eazy and lazy to just throw out the “Mark Davis can’t afford to pay Mack” narrative at this point. John Gruden is in full REBUILD mode and the money Mack wanted and deserved wasn’t going to work in Grudens vision of a rebuild. It seems Gruden is trying to build from the ground up with a sort of Bill Belichick approach that has proven to work for over 15 yrs now. We all may not like or agree with how Gruden is going about it , but it’s happening and we can’t change it. Might as well wait and see what happens. Maybe the Raiders are the next NFL Dynasty.