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By Patrick Patterson





Its easy to wax nostalgic over the Jon Gruden era in Oakland. He was a
charismatic coach and the Raiders won consistently during his four years
in Oakland, and he set the table for the Raiders 2002 Super Bowl run.
That was a good time to be a Raider fan, but the soft focus of hindsight
combined with Gruden’s charisma and Chuckie persona make it easy to miss
that the seeds for the recent disasters were planted during his tenure
as head coach. I would love to see another run of success like the
Raiders had whilst Gruden’s omnipresent scowl stalked the sidelines, but
looking at the Silver lining obscures the Black Clouds that were building.

Jon Gruden took over the Oakland Raiders after the Joe Bugal led
disaster that was 1997. Bugal led the Raiders to underachieve their way
to a 4-12 disaster, at that point it was the worst record of the Al
Davis era. Gruden took over primed to lead the Raider franchise to rise
from its ashes like the Phoenix of Myth, and he succeeded beyond
expectations. His third year the Raiders were in the AFC Championship
Game, where a combination of Tony Siragusa’s belly flop on Rich Gannon
and Marquez Pope and Anthony Dorsett’s inability to tackle Shannon
Sharpe cost the Raiders a chance at the Super Bowl. Gruden’s fourth and
final season as the head of the Raiders’ ship ended on a snowy night in
Foxboro.

Those were good times, with the best yet to come. His successor Bill
Calhihan opened up the play book a bit and led the Raiders to Super Bowl
XXXVII where a Gruden led Tampa Bay team devastated the Raiders based on
Gruden’s knowledge of the Raider offense, and Callihan’s ill-advised
plan to change nothing.

“You can go from boom to bust/ from dreams to a bowl of dust”

–from “Between the Wheels” by Rush

Callihan’s second year began the Raiders plunge, from which they have
yet to emerge three coaches and five years later. How did the Raiders go
from boom to bust so fast? What caused them to tumble faster than George
W. Bush’s approval rating?

If you remember, the joke around the league during the run of the early
part of this century was that the Raiders were the NFL’s retirement
home. By 2002, the Raiders were the oldest team in the league. It was
not the culmination of guys who had been Raiders for ages coming
together for an epic final battle. During the Gruden era, the Raiders
were built to win now, with no thoughts of the future. That is an easy
one to pin on Al Davis, as he is the lightning rod for criticism for
everything that is wrong with the world, but looking at the bigger
picture, very few players during the Gruden era were developed. The ones
who carried the team were the aging vets that signed with Oakland for
that last chance at the ring. The guys like Andre Rison, Jerry Rice, Rod
Woodson, Bill Romonowski, etc.

The easy cop out is to blame Al, as he is the one who is most
responsible for player acquisition. Jon Gruden also was big on that
philosophy, as was Bruce Allen. (more on him in a moment.) To show that
it was not just Al, but Gruden’s inability to develop younger players,
just take a look at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers under Gruden. It took him
bringing in Jeff Garcia to fill the role of Rich Gannon and get the Bucs
back in the playoffs.

Gruden and Al had a synergy in their love of giving aging vets their one
last shot. It worked for the short term, but left the Raiders with a
rotting core. The aging vets aged out together in 03 and Gannon had his
career ended in 04, and no one was left waiting in the wings. True,
Davis tried adding pieces to the puzzle, but there was no foundation and
without a foundation, even the greatest skyscraper will come tumbling down.

After Gruden’s rookie season was marred by a series of groin injuries to
quarterbacks Jeff George, David Klingler, and Donald Hollis, Gruden
brought in veteran quarterback Rich Gannon in a move that would pay huge
dividends for the Raiders. The problem is that Gannon was already 34
when the Raiders acquired him, which is nearly a senior citizen in NFL
years. At no time did Gruden make any apparent moves to groom a
successor. He drafted Marques Tuiasosopo to be an heir apparent in 2001,
but Tui never got any game time until Gannon’s injury in ‘03 in the
second and final year of the Callihan era. The bigger question is when
your starting QB is 34 years old, why wait so long to bring in an heir
apparent?

In addition to Gruden’s distaste for playing young players, the second
problem was that the contracts that the aging vets were signing were
heavily back-loaded creating a major salary cap land-mine for the
Raiders. Bruce Allen was adept at getting the Raiders under the cap for
the current season, but the problem was that it was creating a disaster
down the line. The Raiders had dead money from Gannon’s contract on the
books until last year.

I think that the reason that Gruden wanted out at the end of the 01
season was not that he wasn’t getting the control he wanted. I think
that he saw the writing on the wall from what was coming. He knew that
the team was getting up there in age, and it would not take much for the
entire house of cards he had built to come crashing down. Bruce Allen
was out the door not long after Gruden, and as the Raiders’ capologist
he knew damn well what was happening.

Its easy to think, had Gruden not left the Raiders would not in the
shape that they are in now. I have entertained that same thought. The
problem is that the run that Gruden built was based on planned
obsolescence. The Raiders’ team was due for rebuilding by 2003 due to
age, but there was no infrastructure on the 03 team that was a
foundation on which to build. There was no core of youth that could take
the mantle from the aged veterans. It is true that Al Davis was short
sighted thinking that he could reload for 04 and 05, but at that time
the Raiders were only one and two years removed from a Super Bowl.

The good news is that the rebuilding process has finally begun.
Hopefully JaMarcus Russell is everything the Raiders are hoping, and the
core of youth can bring the Raiders success for the next decade.

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