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This is part of SI.com's MMQB for 8/13/19. To read the entire article click the link below.
*************************************************************************************
https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/08/13/j...n-ramsey-dante-fowler-fight-media-suspensions
The World According to Gruden
By Albert Breer
NAPA, Calif. — In case you were wondering, Jon Gruden did hear you going in on him for his comments on analytics at the combine. You might have called him a dinosaur, or suggested the game passed him by, and that’s O.K.
The new/old Raiders coach—who was actually branded an innovator 20 years ago, the Sean McVay of his era—knew it was coming when he said it. And even if you disagreed then, and maybe you still do now, he doesn’t have to look far to find a pretty difficult-to-dispute response to the criticism.
“I was the first quality control guy in NFL history, just so everybody knows, with the 49ers,” Gruden told me, after Monday’s practice in Wine Country. “What I was there—What are the tendencies? What are they doing on third down? How many times did we run the ball in split-backs? Right? What’s our ratio of run-to-pass in the shotgun? Don’t get me wrong. I love analytics and we can use it.
“Character profiles for the draft, which we do, we can use it all. But sooner or later, you gotta get up there and you gotta call a play. When it’s third-and-3, and I think you’re blitzing, I’m gonna take that into account. I don’t give a damn if it’s 33% zone, I think you’re blitzing. After a while, you need someone to shorten the stack.”
Therein, you have the dichotomy of Jon Gruden in 2018. On one hand, he still carries the playsheet, and he’s still on the quarterback’s hip (in this case Derek Carr’s) when his offense is on the field. It’s also tough to imagine him being more engaged than he was on the morning I was there. At one point, he worked himself up to where his black ’90s-era Raiders hat sat crooked on his head from all the tugging.
When the offense jumps? “Come on!” he yells. “That’s three false starts!” So yes, in a lot of ways, he is the same guy that left coaching behind after being fired from the Bucs following the 2008 season, which is to say he’s not playing CEO.
“This is how I’ve always coached,” he says. “And don’t get me wrong, I’ve got a great staff, and I’m sure I’ll utilize them the best way possible. But I’ve got a vision for what I wanna try to do. … And I gotta lead the charge, I gotta lead the team in effort. That’s one thing I know I can control. I want to outwork myself, the Gruden that was here in 1999, the Gruden that was coaching in Tampa in 2007.”
On the other hand, he learned a lot in his time away, maybe more than he would’ve had he never let the sideline, which sets the stage for his much anticipated second run as Oakland’s coach, with a foundation melding the old principles he won with before, and new ideas he picked up in nine years of calling games at ESPN.
During our talk, we started talking about his reentry into football and wound up covering so much on the Raiders and NFL that it made sense to break it up, and give it you in pieces…
The adjustment back in. It would be easy to figure Gruden would have to re-acclimate to the life of an NFL coach, and going back into the bunker for 16-hour workdays. Which would be assuming, of course, that he actually ever came out of it.
“No one’s really been with me the last seven or eight years, no one really knows what I’ve been doing,” Gruden says. “I’ve been grinding. In my own way, I’ve been grinding hard, and year round, really. I got very little going in my life, man. I got a bad elbow, I can’t golf. I don’t know much about the stock market. I don’t have many other interests but family and the man upstairs and football.
“Everybody’s getting real deep and philosophical about how different everything is. The real players want to be coached, they want structure, they want discipline, they don’t want it to be easy.”
The players he’s looking for. Are those players harder to find this time around (see: the stigma around the term “millennial”)? Gruden says they really aren’t. The reason why was that the Raiders had a lot of needs, which gave him and GM Reggie McKenzie room to renovate the roster in his image.
“We were gutted,” Gruden says. “We didn’t have a linebacker that we knew of on the team. Our secondary, I think they’re all gone. I didn’t know who the right tackle was, Donald Penn was hurt. We needed some depth at all positions. ... We didn’t have a ton of cap money to spend at that time, so we brought in guys that we thought could come in and play right away, guys that could come in and be leaders in every room.”
And he’s seeing it now—Jordy Nelson helps Amari Cooper, Leon Hall helps Rashaan Melvin and Gareon Conley, Derrick Johnson helps Marquel Lee. In other words, where some saw Gruden reaching for aging vets, he saw players with something left who could set the tone for what he and his staff were expecting.
“I tried to bring in a lot of guys like that, like [Marcus] Gilchrist, guys that’ll play for nothing,” Gruden says.
The basis of his program is the same, but it has evolved. One thing all that time “away” gave Gruden was a chance to watch his ex-assistants work. Four of them—McVay, Kyle Shanahan, Mike Tomlin and Jay Gruden—are leading their own programs now.
“It’s like, ‘You know what? The program, it did work,’” he says. “So confirming some things was good. Seeing how different people practice, like today I had a timeout in practice, a TV timeout. Taking the pads off after a certain period, after you get your contact work done. Certain drills, turnover drills, anti-turnover drills. You steal things, you tweak things. So trying to get better practices, that helped me a lot.”
Indeed, the Raiders took the pads off for the last half-hour of the 150-minute session I watched, and you heard those TV timeouts announced over the PA. You also saw some new technology put to work—the staff had video boards adjacent to the practice field (I saw the Rams using them in camp earlier, too) so coaches could correct things right there during drills. Which brings us to…
Incorporating technology. We’re going to get to analytics in a second. But technology—and how it has changed—was where we started in on that conversation. Gruden brought up how, on Monday Night Football, there would be a new gadget to play with every year. And he remembers thinking, “We buy it because it’s new. And you know what? Sometimes the thing we had last year was better. It’s new. It’s not better.”
So he’s tried to take that approach in looking at the advances in football he saw on his trips through the NFL over the last nine years, and deciding which to cherry pick.
“I had a chance to ask all these coaches, ‘What are you doing out with these GPSes? What are you getting out of that?’” he says. “And I hear a lot of the guys saying, ‘Not much.’ I hear that. Then I go another place, and they’re using it, and they’re spending a fortune on it. They got sleep bracelets, they got time chambers, they got the goggles, the quarterbacks are watching 3D vision.
“You can buy all that, spend millions of dollars, and turn this into whatever you want. And we have. We have as good a technology as anyone. But what can you use? I ticked a lot of people off for some reason when I said, ‘We’re gonna get back to the nuts and bolts of football,’ because I have seen a lot of the gimmicks and gadgets not really be beneficial. Is it helping them get better?”
Shortening the stack. When Gruden says he needs to “shorten the stack”, it applies to technology as well it does to analytics, where he sees a need to filter through what he doesn’t see as useful, so he can get his players what is useful in a way that makes the most of the now limited time the team has with them.
“I’ve sat in team meetings, I’ve had a lot of access,” Gruden says. “And the first 10 minutes, the first 15 minutes of the team meeting they talk about hydration and they talk about their workload. ‘You three guys, and you, Albert, you worked too hard yesterday, your story went too long so you’re gonna take it easy today. And you over here, you have to have this recovery shake after practice.’ And that’s the first 15 minutes of the meeting! And I don’t know. I don’t know about that.”
Don’t get it mixed up. Gruden’s not saying strength and conditioning, nutrition and recovery aren’t important. What he is saying is there’s a point where valuable time is taken from the football operation if a team is going over the top with it. And that spills into all the data teams are getting. “I don’t need that much analytical data,” he says, closing his index finger and thumb together, “I need that much, so I can use it.”
He’s not wild about the rules. With all that has changed since 2008, Gruden has taken the good and weighed it against the bad. But there are certain shifts that have taken place in the NFL that he has strong opinions on. The CBA is one.
“When I got this job, I couldn’t even talk to anybody for two months,” he says. “We let Marquette King go, everybody’s saying I’ve got a bad relationship with him, I’d never met the guy! I’d never met him. But we had to make some cap decisions, and you wish you could meet these guys. You wish you could really sit down with Derek Carr and teach him the offense, so you feel behind.
“I don’t like the CBA. I think it stinks. I think it stinks, personally. If the guy wants to work, he ought to be able to come in and work. When you start regulating work ethic, it’s not the American Way.”
Carr, Cooper, Kelechi Osemele, Gabe Jackson and Rodney Hudson played six snaps on Friday night against Detroit. Nelson played five. The defense was in there for two series, and without Gareon Conley and, of course, holdout Khalil Mack (Gruden: “We hope to get Khalil in here, that’s been a challenge”). And there are still a lot more questions than answers on where these Raiders are going.
But one thing that’s unmistakable: Gruden can’t wait to find out. And a little of that came out when he was talking about the CBA. Some coaches have trouble relighting the fire when coming back for a second stint. Not Gruden. It’s pretty obvious, he can’t get enough of it.
“I’ve got a lot of responsibility and passion for this place,” he says. “We’ve had one winning team in 15 years, I think I’m like the 10th head coach to come through here since I’ve been gone. And that’s hard. Hard on the fans, hard on Mark Davis. You gotta put a system in place. So now we’ve got a system.”
And the truth is, it’s a little different than you might have heard.
*************************************************************************************
https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/08/13/j...n-ramsey-dante-fowler-fight-media-suspensions
The World According to Gruden
By Albert Breer
NAPA, Calif. — In case you were wondering, Jon Gruden did hear you going in on him for his comments on analytics at the combine. You might have called him a dinosaur, or suggested the game passed him by, and that’s O.K.
The new/old Raiders coach—who was actually branded an innovator 20 years ago, the Sean McVay of his era—knew it was coming when he said it. And even if you disagreed then, and maybe you still do now, he doesn’t have to look far to find a pretty difficult-to-dispute response to the criticism.
“I was the first quality control guy in NFL history, just so everybody knows, with the 49ers,” Gruden told me, after Monday’s practice in Wine Country. “What I was there—What are the tendencies? What are they doing on third down? How many times did we run the ball in split-backs? Right? What’s our ratio of run-to-pass in the shotgun? Don’t get me wrong. I love analytics and we can use it.
“Character profiles for the draft, which we do, we can use it all. But sooner or later, you gotta get up there and you gotta call a play. When it’s third-and-3, and I think you’re blitzing, I’m gonna take that into account. I don’t give a damn if it’s 33% zone, I think you’re blitzing. After a while, you need someone to shorten the stack.”
Therein, you have the dichotomy of Jon Gruden in 2018. On one hand, he still carries the playsheet, and he’s still on the quarterback’s hip (in this case Derek Carr’s) when his offense is on the field. It’s also tough to imagine him being more engaged than he was on the morning I was there. At one point, he worked himself up to where his black ’90s-era Raiders hat sat crooked on his head from all the tugging.
When the offense jumps? “Come on!” he yells. “That’s three false starts!” So yes, in a lot of ways, he is the same guy that left coaching behind after being fired from the Bucs following the 2008 season, which is to say he’s not playing CEO.
“This is how I’ve always coached,” he says. “And don’t get me wrong, I’ve got a great staff, and I’m sure I’ll utilize them the best way possible. But I’ve got a vision for what I wanna try to do. … And I gotta lead the charge, I gotta lead the team in effort. That’s one thing I know I can control. I want to outwork myself, the Gruden that was here in 1999, the Gruden that was coaching in Tampa in 2007.”
On the other hand, he learned a lot in his time away, maybe more than he would’ve had he never let the sideline, which sets the stage for his much anticipated second run as Oakland’s coach, with a foundation melding the old principles he won with before, and new ideas he picked up in nine years of calling games at ESPN.
During our talk, we started talking about his reentry into football and wound up covering so much on the Raiders and NFL that it made sense to break it up, and give it you in pieces…
The adjustment back in. It would be easy to figure Gruden would have to re-acclimate to the life of an NFL coach, and going back into the bunker for 16-hour workdays. Which would be assuming, of course, that he actually ever came out of it.
“No one’s really been with me the last seven or eight years, no one really knows what I’ve been doing,” Gruden says. “I’ve been grinding. In my own way, I’ve been grinding hard, and year round, really. I got very little going in my life, man. I got a bad elbow, I can’t golf. I don’t know much about the stock market. I don’t have many other interests but family and the man upstairs and football.
“Everybody’s getting real deep and philosophical about how different everything is. The real players want to be coached, they want structure, they want discipline, they don’t want it to be easy.”
The players he’s looking for. Are those players harder to find this time around (see: the stigma around the term “millennial”)? Gruden says they really aren’t. The reason why was that the Raiders had a lot of needs, which gave him and GM Reggie McKenzie room to renovate the roster in his image.
“We were gutted,” Gruden says. “We didn’t have a linebacker that we knew of on the team. Our secondary, I think they’re all gone. I didn’t know who the right tackle was, Donald Penn was hurt. We needed some depth at all positions. ... We didn’t have a ton of cap money to spend at that time, so we brought in guys that we thought could come in and play right away, guys that could come in and be leaders in every room.”
And he’s seeing it now—Jordy Nelson helps Amari Cooper, Leon Hall helps Rashaan Melvin and Gareon Conley, Derrick Johnson helps Marquel Lee. In other words, where some saw Gruden reaching for aging vets, he saw players with something left who could set the tone for what he and his staff were expecting.
“I tried to bring in a lot of guys like that, like [Marcus] Gilchrist, guys that’ll play for nothing,” Gruden says.
The basis of his program is the same, but it has evolved. One thing all that time “away” gave Gruden was a chance to watch his ex-assistants work. Four of them—McVay, Kyle Shanahan, Mike Tomlin and Jay Gruden—are leading their own programs now.
“It’s like, ‘You know what? The program, it did work,’” he says. “So confirming some things was good. Seeing how different people practice, like today I had a timeout in practice, a TV timeout. Taking the pads off after a certain period, after you get your contact work done. Certain drills, turnover drills, anti-turnover drills. You steal things, you tweak things. So trying to get better practices, that helped me a lot.”
Indeed, the Raiders took the pads off for the last half-hour of the 150-minute session I watched, and you heard those TV timeouts announced over the PA. You also saw some new technology put to work—the staff had video boards adjacent to the practice field (I saw the Rams using them in camp earlier, too) so coaches could correct things right there during drills. Which brings us to…
Incorporating technology. We’re going to get to analytics in a second. But technology—and how it has changed—was where we started in on that conversation. Gruden brought up how, on Monday Night Football, there would be a new gadget to play with every year. And he remembers thinking, “We buy it because it’s new. And you know what? Sometimes the thing we had last year was better. It’s new. It’s not better.”
So he’s tried to take that approach in looking at the advances in football he saw on his trips through the NFL over the last nine years, and deciding which to cherry pick.
“I had a chance to ask all these coaches, ‘What are you doing out with these GPSes? What are you getting out of that?’” he says. “And I hear a lot of the guys saying, ‘Not much.’ I hear that. Then I go another place, and they’re using it, and they’re spending a fortune on it. They got sleep bracelets, they got time chambers, they got the goggles, the quarterbacks are watching 3D vision.
“You can buy all that, spend millions of dollars, and turn this into whatever you want. And we have. We have as good a technology as anyone. But what can you use? I ticked a lot of people off for some reason when I said, ‘We’re gonna get back to the nuts and bolts of football,’ because I have seen a lot of the gimmicks and gadgets not really be beneficial. Is it helping them get better?”
Shortening the stack. When Gruden says he needs to “shorten the stack”, it applies to technology as well it does to analytics, where he sees a need to filter through what he doesn’t see as useful, so he can get his players what is useful in a way that makes the most of the now limited time the team has with them.
“I’ve sat in team meetings, I’ve had a lot of access,” Gruden says. “And the first 10 minutes, the first 15 minutes of the team meeting they talk about hydration and they talk about their workload. ‘You three guys, and you, Albert, you worked too hard yesterday, your story went too long so you’re gonna take it easy today. And you over here, you have to have this recovery shake after practice.’ And that’s the first 15 minutes of the meeting! And I don’t know. I don’t know about that.”
Don’t get it mixed up. Gruden’s not saying strength and conditioning, nutrition and recovery aren’t important. What he is saying is there’s a point where valuable time is taken from the football operation if a team is going over the top with it. And that spills into all the data teams are getting. “I don’t need that much analytical data,” he says, closing his index finger and thumb together, “I need that much, so I can use it.”
He’s not wild about the rules. With all that has changed since 2008, Gruden has taken the good and weighed it against the bad. But there are certain shifts that have taken place in the NFL that he has strong opinions on. The CBA is one.
“When I got this job, I couldn’t even talk to anybody for two months,” he says. “We let Marquette King go, everybody’s saying I’ve got a bad relationship with him, I’d never met the guy! I’d never met him. But we had to make some cap decisions, and you wish you could meet these guys. You wish you could really sit down with Derek Carr and teach him the offense, so you feel behind.
“I don’t like the CBA. I think it stinks. I think it stinks, personally. If the guy wants to work, he ought to be able to come in and work. When you start regulating work ethic, it’s not the American Way.”
Carr, Cooper, Kelechi Osemele, Gabe Jackson and Rodney Hudson played six snaps on Friday night against Detroit. Nelson played five. The defense was in there for two series, and without Gareon Conley and, of course, holdout Khalil Mack (Gruden: “We hope to get Khalil in here, that’s been a challenge”). And there are still a lot more questions than answers on where these Raiders are going.
But one thing that’s unmistakable: Gruden can’t wait to find out. And a little of that came out when he was talking about the CBA. Some coaches have trouble relighting the fire when coming back for a second stint. Not Gruden. It’s pretty obvious, he can’t get enough of it.
“I’ve got a lot of responsibility and passion for this place,” he says. “We’ve had one winning team in 15 years, I think I’m like the 10th head coach to come through here since I’ve been gone. And that’s hard. Hard on the fans, hard on Mark Davis. You gotta put a system in place. So now we’ve got a system.”
And the truth is, it’s a little different than you might have heard.
