Greg Papa isn’t on the Raiders payroll any longer, but he’s still paid to talk about them and he gave his thoughts on Jon Gruden, Khalil Mack, and the state of the Raiders this week on his 95.7 The Game radio show.
“He got control of everything,” Papa on Tuesday. “You could see it in the way he drafted, trading down, not taking the safety from Florida State, Derwin James, taking the left tackle Kolton Miller, just a lot of things, but I think he just wanted to get rid [of Mack’s situation], he wanted it to just go away. He’s a football coach and his mentality was ‘I’m a new coach in town, I’m open for business, the guy never showed up, he wasn’t going to show up for a game and I want it to go away.'”
“And the reality is it’s not like [Mack] fell off of the earth. He’s in this league and right now everyone is dawning over him and right now, two weeks into the year, it just started, he would be a landslide winner for defensive player of the year awards. So it’s really not going to go away and it’s sad because I’m the one who talked about Jon coming back more than anyone… but [the Raiders] needed to control him.”
So far, Gruden has shown himself to be an improvement as a head coach, but there’s no question the Raiders are playing with fire by giving Gruden full control of the personnel department.
Greg Papa sees it, objective fans see it, and hopefully the organization will see it before Gruden manages to generally manage the Raiders back to the basement of the AFC.
For what it’s worth, the fan base (on Twitter at least) is still confident Gruden is up to the task of righting the ship…
POLL: Are you confident in Jon Gruden’s ability to turn around the #Raiders?
— Raiders Beat (@RaidersBeat) September 19, 2018
twitter: @raidersbeat
I feel like I did 10 years ago when they were a garbage team, making mistake after mistake both in the draft and free agency. We do have better coaching now, so I will give them that. You can see that they don’t look like a bunch of lost puppy dogs on the field like they did under that bonehead Ken Norton. They just don’t have the game-breaking talent that other teams have (i.e. Mack, Von Miller, Donald, etc.) to shutdown a game.
I hate to admit it and it won’t be a popular opinion, but Kolton Miller looks like a legit starting tackle, which this team needed VERY badly. Conversely, Key and Mo Hurst appear to have been WAY over-hyped as so-called “draft steals” because I’m seeing almost nothing from them…..oh well…..another year down the toilet….
You can’t really judge rookies by their first 2 games. Even Mack wasn’t dominant.