Jon Gruden was bad at everything
The Raiders' $100 million man was a failure in every regard.
Jon Gruden is no longer head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders. He may be the person most impacted by the NFL’s investigation into the Washington Football Team -- a franchise that employed him for exactly zero days.
There’s no shortage of words spilled as to what Gruden said and why he had to go. His leaks were a bingo card of fireable offenses all adding up to a man whose public face and private whispers were separated by a gaping fault line. Even if his words could be forgiven, he was a man players and executives couldn’t trust and free agents would actively avoid.
Well, maybe not Richie Incognito.
Gruden was a catastrophe for Mark Davis, the prom date he chased for years, rented the biggest limo for, and then watched as he coated the backseat with black cherry wine cooler vomit. But to limit his failures to the emails that brought him down would only tell a fraction of the story. Gruden approached his Monday Night Football gig like one of the boys at the bar, then treated his roster in Oakland, then Las Vegas, with the same level of care.
Let’s review:
2018: Gruden trades away Khalil Mack, promptly loses his magic beans
Mack wanted a contract extension befitting the 2016 Defensive Player of the Year. Gruden, who’d gushed about him in the winter following his announcement as the team’s head coach, wanted the flexibility to build his own roster. So instead of committing the $23.5 million in annual salary the pass rusher would later receive from the Bears, he shipped him to Chicago for two first round picks, a third round pick, a late-round swap, and some newly-minuted cap space.
Here’s who Gruden, awarded extraordinary roster building power by Davis in contract negotiations, brought to the roster in free agency that year:
WR Jordy Nelson
RB Doug Martin
S Marcus Gilchrist
LB Tahir Whitehead
CB Rashaan Melvin
Nelson and Martin each spent their last year in the pros with Gruden in 2018 before shuffling off to retirement. Gilchrist signed a one-year, $4 million deal, gave up a 102.3 rating in coverage, and then went unsigned the following year until the Lions picked him up in October. He’s played five total NFL games since that Raiders stint and is currently not on a roster. Melvin is a fine third or fourth corner and Whitehead is a solid run stopper who was objectively awful in coverage (140.4 passer rating allowed his final year in Oakland).
These are the three players selected with the Day 1 and 2 selections the Bears sold off:
CB Damon Arnette
RB Josh Jacobs
WR Bryan Edwards
Arnette started only seven games as a rookie and has fallen out of the lineup in 2021 (four games, zero starts). Jacobs had a rookie of the year caliber debut, but has dealt with injury in the year-plus since. Gruden thought so much of his talent he went out and handed Kenyan Drake $11 million to play running back in Las Vegas last offseason. Edwards has 24 receptions in 17 career games.
You’ll notice none of these guys can rush the passer, which is why the 2018 Raiders finished the season with 13 total sacks -- fewer than six individual players had all season and as many as guys like Ryan Kerrigan and Frank Clark. Unsurprisingly, the Raiders were very bad en route to a 4-12 season. The 2018 season and the Mack trade were both very, very bad opening acts for the coach-turned-commentator-turned-very-rich-coach.
2019: Bad first round picks, worse free agents
Gruden’s second draft with the club featured a league-high three first round picks thanks to the Mack trade and a deal that shipped Amari Cooper to Dallas for a Day 1 selection. With those picks, the Raiders chose:
DL Clelin Ferrell
Jacobs
S Jonathan Abram
Ferrell, an eye-opening reach at No. 4 overall, has 6.5 career sacks and hasn’t started a single game in 2021; he was a healthy scratch in Week 1. Jacobs, as previously mentioned, is perfectly fine when healthy but also plays a position where it’s been proven time and time again there’s little need to spend big to acquire talent. Abram hits very hard but struggles with over-the-top centerfield coverage at safety, which is a big deal when you face Patrick Mahomes and Justin Herbert twice annually.
Hindsight is a stupid exercise, but had Gruden opted for the best player available via that year’s consensus mock draft board, he could have had:
4. LB Devin White (nine sacks in 2020, Super Bowl champion)
24. Jacobs OR CB Byron Murphy (54.5 passer rating against in 2021)
27. DE Montez Sweat (19 sacks in 37 pro games)
To his credit, the franchise *did* hit on cornerback Trayvon Mullen in the second round, Maxx Crosby in the fourth, and Hunter Renfrow in the fifth. Mullen has emerged as a viable starter in the secondary and building block going forward. Crosby is the heart and soul of the team’s current pass rush, and Renfrow has emerged as Derek Carr’s most trusted route-runner.
However, this was after adding veteran executive Mike Mayock to the mix as general manager with the tacit arrangement Gruden would handle the wheat on Day 1 and Mayock would sort through the chaff in the later rounds. I’m not sure how much talent evaluator credit the head coach deserves for those pickups. Let’s see how he built around his young class in free agency. Here are the top four members of his second FA class, signed for a mere $200 million in total contract value:
LT Trent Brown
SS Lamarcus Joyner
WR Tyrell Williams
WR Antonio Brown
Oh, no. Brown played 16 games in silver and black before getting shipped back to New England for a swap of Day 3 picks in a salary dump. Joyner was a nightmare in coverage and was released halfway through his four-year contract. Williams had 42 catches in 2019, opted out of the 2020 season, and was released in 2021. Antonio Brown is Antonio Brown; y’all know enough about football to sign up for this newsletter, so I feel like I don’t need to go any further down that rabbit hole.
Despite the disastrous additions, the Raiders improved to 7-9 ahead of their move to Las Vegas. This included zero wins over teams that finished the season with winning records. Back to the draft!
2020: It’s … not great so far
Gruden spent his first round pick on Alabama speedster Henry Ruggs, who disappointed as a rookie but has been pretty great as a field-stretching deep threat in 2021 (17 receptions, 348 yards, a league-high 20.5 yards per catch). His second pick, the last big swing of the Mack trade, went to Arnette.
The team also selected Kentucky WR/RB/QB Lynn Bowden in the third round, then shipped him to the Dolphins, along with a sixth round pick, for a fourth rounder four months later. Vegas selected Clemson safety/linebacker Tanner Muse 20 picks afterward; he was released this preseason without ever playing in a regular season game.
So, one hit, two buckets of “maybe, but it looks bad,” and two players who didn’t dress for a single snap in their five top 100 picks. Regrettable! How about free agency? There were 2020’s highest-paid additions:
LB Cory Littleton
LB Nick Kwiatkowski
DE Carl Nassib
QB Marcus Mariota
Littleton and Kwiatkowski were beneficiaries of a slim linebacker market, so overpays there should be graded on a curve. Both have been solid, if unspectacular in Vegas.
Nassib is the league’s first openly gay player, so he probably didn’t love his head coach throwing homophobic language around to describe things he didn’t like to his work buddies. He’s a perfectly fine rotational pass rusher but probably not worth more than $8 million annually (four sacks, 11 QB hits in 19 games). Mariota got a $17 million deal to play backup and stoke concerns over whether or not Gruden trusts Derek Carr.
Small improvements paid off (a career year from Nelson Agholor helped), and the Raiders climbed to .500 for the first time since ‘16 thanks in no small part to an upset win over the defending champion Chiefs in Kansas City. They also fell from 6-3 to out of the playoffs, nearly lost to the hopeless Jets, and got crushed into a puddle by a four-win Falcon team 43-6.
You know, normal Raider stuff.
2021: It doesn’t matter
This year’s first round pick, Alabama’s Alex Leatherwood, was expected to slide to Day 2. He’s been one of the league’s worst starting linemen through the first month of the season. The team’s three most expensive free agents were Yannick Ngakoue (second on the team in QB hits not bad), Kenyan Drake (2.4 yards per carry, bad), and John Brown (... asked for, and granted, his release before the start of the regular season).
Things do not appear to have been getting better, even with a 3-0 start. Now they will not get better, at least under Gruden, because Gruden is gone. Left to rebuild is a general manager who is likely relieved his team will make personnel decisions based on scouting and research rather than gut decisions and youtube highlight reels. Interim head coach Rich Bisaccia gets to play the role of “guy who takes over the one team in your keeper fantasy league whose manager never checked in and so his roster is a couple of keepers and a weird mishmash of free agents and prospects no one wanted.”
The Raiders will rebound from this and become a better franchise. It could even happen this season based on the potential we saw the first three weeks. But first Las Vegas has to deal with the aftermath of the past five days, fully understanding that Gruden was in no way worth the headache his emails eventually brought.
Thursday Night Football picks
The Eagles have been better than expected, getting out to a 2-3 start despite playing the 2021 season on “expert mode” thanks to more than $50 million in dead salary cap commitments. Even so, they’ve been handled by teams with accomplished offenses; the Cowboys and Chiefs each dropped 42 points on them. The Buccaneers fall very much in that same category; we’re all going with Tampa Bay.