The Raiders are rebuilding and everyone knows it. It’s ok. Khalil Mack and Amari Cooper were a big part of what returned the Raiders to being a respectable franchise, but with an arsenal of draft picks over the next two years, maybe better days are still ahead.
Jon Gruden returned to the Raiders for $100 million and the justification for his salary was in part to bring enthusiasm to a fan base as the team transitioned to Las Vegas. What players and fans liked about Gruden from the start was his willingness to speak his mind. For the first time in years, the Raiders injury report wasn’t shrouded in mystery, the players seemed to know where they stood with their coach, and press conferences were finally fun again. In the age of information, Gruden’s openness was a welcome change.
But here’s the problem… the truth isn’t regularly coming out of the building anymore. What we liked about Gruden was his blunt honesty, but where did that go? How can he repeatedly throw his general manager under the bus and then pretend all is well. Or even better, how does he send his general manager out to tell everyone all is well?
Even yesterday McKenzie was talking about all the decisions he was making when everyone knows exactly where the decisions are coming from. McKenzie would never have traded a third-round pick for Martavis Bryant in the last year of a contract. He would have never put all of his top picks on the trade block, and he never would have orchestrated two separate draft boards. But here we are in October pretending things never happened.
“We’ve got one draft board,” Reggie McKenzie told the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Tuesday. “Every coaching staff that I’ve been a part of from Green Bay to Gruden’s staff, I want to know how the coaches rank each player. That’s not going to change. I want to know how they like players. To say they have their own draft board, no. They have their own way of doing it because that’s the way our system is put up. It’s the way I’ve always done it. We go in the big draft room, and that’s what we go by.”
Gruden pretended Cooper wasn’t going to be traded and now he is being asked about Derek Carr. Instead of denying that Carr will be traded he simply says that no one else will be traded. The fact that we know Gruden is doing everything possible to trade Karl Joseph (among others) shows just how unbelievable Gruden is right now… and that’s why it’s hard to be sure of where he stands on Carr.
We all know what’s going on. The Raiders might not want to call it tanking, but they’re trying to win with as few good players as possible in effort to build for the future. It’s actually not a terrible decision. So wouldn’t it be nice to hear Gruden call the situation what it is for once? Isn’t that one of the things we liked about him so much in the first place?
twitter: @raidersbeat
That’s been the frustrating thing about Gruden 2.0. Nobody but him really knows what’s going on with this team. If he parts ways with Carr, we can only hope he gets someone better and not worse. Remember, Jon called the Raiders on draft day 2 years ago and did everything he could to convince them to draft Johnny Manziel…
His love of QB’s is scary. He would not know how to choose one, if his contract depended on it. Scary times in Oakland
Cooper wasn’t effective . So it’s not like trading him diminishes our chance of winning . Mack is a completely different story . Once he was gone , all hell broke loose . I know what you mean about the truth . Somethings got to give .