Why the Raiders are worse off with Jon Gruden in charge

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CGI_Ram

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https://www.thescore.com/nfl/news/1560250

Why the Raiders are worse off with Jon Gruden in charge

Coming off a stunningly disappointing 6-10 season in which no other AFC team took a further step backward, the Oakland Raidersdemonstrated this offseason why they'll be the perfect marriage for Las Vegas when the franchise moves to Sin City in 2019.

Raiders owner Mark Davis gambled big in January and perhaps mortgaged his team's future through a series of transactions that started - but certainly didn’t end - with the luring of Jon Gruden out of the broadcast booth for an outlandish $100-million coaching contract over 10 years. It's an unprecedented payout that alone guarantees Gruden more power than most NFL bench bosses enjoy.

Nine years had passed since the wide-eyed, cartoonish Monday Night Football analyst last coached in the NFL, and 12 since Gruden led the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to double-digit wins.


Sure, Gruden isn't the first coach to return from a long respite, and some have found success.

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Dick Vermeil took a 15-year break after leaving the Eagles in 1982, citing burnout at just 45 years old, and returned at 61 to coach the St. Louis Rams, whom he guided to a Super Bowl title three years later.

Bill Parcells took four years off after the leaving the Jets in 1999 and resurfaced in Dallas to coach the Cowboys at 62, winning 34 games in four seasons (but no playoff contests) before retiring after the owner had forced Terrell Owens upon him in 2006.

Pete Carroll spent 10 years away from the NFL after the Patriots fired him in 1999 before the Seahawkshired him in 2010, but at least Carroll spent most of those years rebuilding USC into a national college powerhouse.

In the Raiders' case, the full-court press on Gruden felt like a desperate attempt by Davis to spark his team by wrangling the hottest "name" on the market - which Gruden has been every year since the Bucs fired him in January 2009 - instead of following the league's trend of going young and player-friendly.

For years, Gruden had rebuffed offers, determining that analyzing from the comfy confines of ESPN's booth for a hefty paycheck beat the stress and anxiety of coaching in a league where everyone other than Bill Belichick is perpetually on the hot seat.

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It wasn't until widespread layoffs at ESPN - resulting in hundreds of marquee industry names on the unemployment line - that Gruden suddenly, and conveniently, said the pull of the locker room was too great to ignore.

Davis doling out $100 million to make sure he landed his man smacks of the New York Knicksunabashedly upping their ante several times to Phil Jackson until finally convincing the Zen Master to come out retirement and lead basketball operations – with an eye-popping contract that paid $12 million annually.

How'd that work out?

You don’t pay an NFL head coach $10 million to merely handle Xs and Os, so it’s no surprise that reports quickly surfaced after Gruden's hiring that Raiders GM Reggie McKenzie would see his power diminish under the new sheriff.

Meanwhile, several of the team’s decisions since Gruden's hiring indicate an aimless franchise that isn’t rock-solid from top to bottom despite the supposed change in culture he was expected to bring. They include:

  • Hiring assistant coach Tom Cable to fix the offensive line after Cable struggled with that same responsibility in his prior stop with the Seahawks.
  • Dealing a third-round pick to the Steelers for troubled receiver Martavis Bryant, only to find out there could be another issue between the receiver and the NFL regarding its substance-abuse policy. Bryant has already served 20 combined games of suspension in his career and has only started 16 contests.
  • Releasing 30-year-old wideout Michael Crabtree after three seasons in which he averaged 77 receptions, 847 yards, and eight touchdowns while replacing him with an older Jordy Nelson, who didn’t even reach 500 yards last year.
  • Using the 15th overall pick on UCLA offensive tackle Kolton Miller, a choice met with skepticism among scouts who spoke to theScore. One personnel executive called the decision “head-scratching.”
But perhaps the Raiders' most head-scratching decision has been venturing this far into the offseason without extending the contract of their best player, who seems none too thrilled about it.

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Pass-rusher Khalil Mack is entering the fifth and final year of his deal despite racking up 36.5 sacks over the past three seasons and making the Pro Bowl in each of those.

Mack skipped the team's mandatory camp earlier this month and NFL Network recently reported that he and the Raiders remain far apart. That Oakland hasn't locked up one of the NFL's best young defensive players is curious.

Given all that, Gruden must show he's worth $10 million annually and is equipped to coach today's players when training camp opens in July.

The Raiders have talent - including quarterback Derek Carr, Mack, wide receiver Amari Cooper, safety Karl Joseph, and guard Kelechi Osemele - but they're also leaning heavily on several aging veterans. Marshawn Lynch, Leon Hall, Reggie Nelson, and Bruce Irvin are all over 30, and asking them to stay healthy and productive on the downside of their careers is a tall order.

Meanwhile, the AFC West is a tough division. The Chiefs are reloading around young gunslinger Patrick Mahomes while Philip Rivers and the Chargers are looking to carry over the momentum of winning six of their last seven games in 2017.

The Raiders pushed all their chips forward to bank on Gruden – and they might very well come to regret that decision.

Geoff Mosher is an award-winning sports reporter, radio host, and TV personality with more than 20 years of experience covering all major sports and leagues. He also hosts regularly on 97.5 The Fanatic in Philadelphia and co-hosts "The Sports Shop" on Facebook.

(Photos courtesy: Getty Images)
 

Akrasian

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Some bounceback after such a decline is likely - but yeah, their offseason moves, to put it politely, suck.

I expect them to regret Gruden fairly quickly. Which pleases me greatly.
 

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https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/06/18/oakland-raiders-2018-nfl-preview

Jon Gruden Is Back, With a Big Rebuilding Job: 10 Thoughts on the Raiders
He inherited a top-flight young quarterback, but there are lots of holes elsewhere on the Raiders. No one really knows what to expect from Gruden after 10 years away from coaching, but one thing’s certain: It won’t be boring in Oakland in 2018
By ANDY BENOIT

1. One of the most fascinating “football nerd” items to watch this season is how often Jon Gruden has QB Derek Carr under center, as opposed to in the shotgun. Gruden is an advocate for traditional under-center quarterbacking, as that exchange synchronizes the timing and mechanics he preaches in his West Coast offense. But Carr, like every twentysomething-year-old QB, has spent much of his life in shotgun.

The rise in shotgun popularity was partly a response to the diverse nickel fronts that defenses started presenting right around the time Gruden left coaching for broadcasting. Now it’s a way to maximize quick-timing throws out of three-receiver sets—an approach, by the way, that plays to Carr’s physical attributes. You can run a lot of West Coast concepts out of shotgun, just with some procedural differences. How much will Gruden tweak his approach, and how much will he ask Carr to tweak his?

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Getty Images

Another question is: How will Gruden’s personality jibe with Carr’s?Some suspect that Gruden’s relentless teaching methods will wear on the mellow fifth-year QB. Others wonder if Gruden’s big personality will suffocate Carr’s leadership growth.

As a head coach, Gruden has not successfully developed many young quarterbacks; his greatest achievements have been with Brad Johnson and Rich Gannon when they were in their mid-30s. Carr and Gruden have professed harmony and mutual admiration, but we won’t know how real that is until they endure the tribulations of a regular season.

2. Carr’s wide receivers must be more reliable. Replacing Michael Crabtree with Jordy Nelson helps with emotional reliability, but if Gruden doesn’t deliberately call plays that get Nelson open through design, the 33-year-old longtime Packer will struggle. Nelson no longer has great burst, speed or change-of-direction.

He can be effective from the slot, where there is no press coverage, but there should be serious consideration for putting fourth-year pro Amari Cooper there more often, given how Cooper dominates when he gets into a route cleanly but often flounders against perimeter press corners.

Complicating matters is that with Martavis Bryant possibly facing another suspension, Oakland’s next two best receivers are natural slot guys: incumbent Seth Roberts, who runs seam routes well, and former Cowboy Ryan Switzer, who hopes to be a dynamic gadget weapon.

3. Drafting offensive tackles Kolton Miller in Round 1 and Brandon Parker in Round 3 made sense, even though concerns about Oakland’s defensive talent are legitimate. Donald Penn, who is 35, and coming off a serious foot injury and an up-and-down year, was the only starting-caliber tackle on the roster before the draft. Carr is slight of frame and has gotten hurt each of the last two years. He must be protected, especially if Gruden runs a lot of traditional under-center pass plays.

4. Guards Kelechi Osemele and Gabe Jackson, and center Rodney Hudson, form one of the game’s best interior O-lines. Marshawn Lynch, who’s still an insistent runner, is particularly adept at setting up blocks inside. Gruden must commit to these four in the ground game more than 2017 offensive play-caller Todd Downing did.

5. Doug Martin was signed to back up Marshawn Lynch. The two are not similar runners (Lynch is more powerful, Martin is shiftier), but you can run similar concepts with them. The big question is, Will Martin’s presence take snaps from the team’s most dynamic space-creating back, Jalen Richard?

6. This defense last season finished with 31 sacks (tied for eighth fewest in the league) and 14 turnovers, one more than Cleveland’s league-low total. Such futility simply cannot be with a unit that boasts Khalil Mack and Bruce Irvin off the edges. Such players cost tens of millions of dollars because they force quarterbacks off schedule, which is how a defense creates big plays.

7. There won’t be a defensive identity crisis again this year. New coordinator Paul Guenther has a well-defined scheme. It centers around two-deep zone coverage and features a bevy of double-A-gap pressures and “odd front” zone blitzes, where a nosetackle covers the center and box defenders rotate after the snap in various ways. Guenther will have more freedom under Gruden than he did under the defensive-minded Marvin Lewis in Cincinnati. Expect to see his blitzes more often.

8. Defenses that play two-deep coverage tend to align their 3-technique defensive tackle on the strong side, where he faces double-team blocks from the guard and tackle. This is called an “over” front, and Guenther will feature it often, in part because it usually leaves a one-on-one matchup for Mack or Irvin against a tight end. But for an “over” front to work, that defensive tackle must contest those double-team blocks. In Cincinnati, Guenther had a destructive 3-tech in Geno Atkins.

Who will be Guenther’s Geno Atkins in Oakland? Last year’s seventh-rounder Treyvon Hester showed flashes, but more likely it will be second-round rookie P.J. Hall, who is built like Atkins, or fifth-rounder Maurice Hurst, who was a first-round prospect before doctors discovered he had a heart condition.

9. Questions at cornerback abound, especially if last year’s first-rounder, Gareon Conley, who played just two games as a rookie because of injuries, doesn’t develop. But equally concerning is the free safety position. Reggie Nelson, a Bengal from 2010 to ’15, understands Guenther’s scheme, but awareness doesn’t matter if a player can’t run.

Nelson, who turns 35 in September, at times looks like he’s in sand. With 2017 second-rounder Obi Melifonwu missing much of the offseason due to injury, don’t be surprised if versatile journeyman Marcus Gilchrist gets significant snaps at safety alongside Karl Joseph.

10. NaVorro Bowman’s ongoing unemployment is somewhat curious. The Raiders want him back, but at a lower price than he seeks. He brought badly needed stability and occasional playmaking to this linebacker unit in the second half of last season. Now the Raiders are counting on aging longtime Chief Derrick Johnson and fast but hot-and-cold ex-Lion Tahir Whitehead to revamp their otherwise subpar linebacking corps.

BOTTOM LINE: It’s been 10 years since we last saw Jon Gruden. He has a QB, backfield and O-line, but there are questions everywhere else.
 

Loyal

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Raiders have sucked, but I think the move to Vegas is brilliant. I will be following the Las Vegas Raiders a bit to see how that all works out.
 

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Raiders have him 100 million basically guaranteed...why are we still negotiating with 99?
 

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Raiders have him 100 million basically guaranteed...why are we still negotiating with 99?
Don't think Gruden's cash is figured into the cap?
 

den-the-coach

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Meh. To me, Gruden = Fisher:LOL::fuelfire::rimshot:

Hmmm.....Not sure about that, Gruden did hire an excellent DC in Paul Gunther the big question is, how is Gruden going to be able to relate to a younger players? Rams play the Raiders in the first game of the year, I will refrain from judgment, until that game is over.
 

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Hmmm.....Not sure about that, Gruden did hire an excellent DC in Paul Gunther the big question is, how is Gruden going to be able to relate to a younger players? Rams play the Raiders in the first game of the year, I will refrain from judgment, until that game is over.
 

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Hmmm.....Not sure about that, Gruden did hire an excellent DC in Paul Gunther the big question is, how is Gruden going to be able to relate to a younger players? Rams play the Raiders in the first game of the year, I will refrain from judgment, until that game is over.
I just don't think they have the talent. Chucky is more innovative from an offense perspective, but I think Fishy is a better D mind. Like you say though, we'll see.
 

VegasRam

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Raiders have him 100 million basically guaranteed...why are we still negotiating with 99?

Because the Raiders (management is) are stupid and the Rams are not.

I’m glad as a Vegas resident getting an NFL team, and not a fan (or hater) of the Raiders, but don’t think they’ll do that well.
 

Loyal

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Because the Raiders (management is) are stupid and the Rams are not.

I’m glad as a Vegas resident getting an NFL team, and not a fan (or hater) of the Raiders, but don’t think they’ll do that well.
Checks out Raider gear, just in case...~Vegas Ram
 

Merlin

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I think a lot of you are in for a surprise by how well Gruden does in his second go-round. He has a good eye for talent on his staff as well as some of the key positions, and a lot of pieces to work with. Plus the AFC West is a cesspool of a division with the projected divisional winner fielding an unproven QB and returning a defense that was bad last year minus its best CB. Chargers will probably be their biggest rival for the division this year, but their offense criminally underperforms and their QB is old as F with a thousand kids and didn't want to leave San Dog.

Not sure if he'll win the division this year. But he's got as good a chance as anyone and with that staff and the pieces in place I think their future looks pretty damn good.

Plus that setup in Vegas is gonna be sweet, especially if they're a team on the rise when they get there which I think they will be.
 

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https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/06/21/o...aul-guenther-defensive-coordinator-jon-gruden

How an NFL Defense Is Built
When Jon Gruden returned to the NFL, he wanted Paul Guenther to build his defense. How the long-time Bengals DC is putting togther the Oakland D nearly from scratch, from uprooting his family, to finding coaches and teaching them how to teach players, to calling upon years of scouting to get the roster right
By ANDY BENOIT

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NFL PHOTOS/AP

On a Saturday evening last December, Bengals defensive coordinator Paul Guenther drove downtown after work and picked up Jon Gruden from the Renaissance Cincinnati hotel. Gruden was in town to call Monday’s Bengals-Steelers game for ESPN. The two had known each other for years, and Guenther was friends with Jon’s brother Jay after their three seasons together in Cincinnati. The two went to dinner at a country club near Guenther’s house.

Gruden said he was thinking about returning to the NFL. Guenther had heard this before, but “he had a little different look in his eye this time.” When Guenther got home he told his wife, Patrice, that Gruden might be coming back—and if he did, he’d almost certainly want Guenther to coordinate his defense.

Guenther joined the Bengals in 2005 as a low-level assistant and was promoted to linebackers coach in 2012. When defensive coordinator Mike Zimmer left for the Vikings head job in 2014, Marvin Lewis pegged Guenther to take over. However, Zimmer had wanted Guenther to take that same post in Minnesota, and Jay Gruden, who got the Washington job that year, also offered his defensive coordinator position.

“My kids were just getting into school in Cincinnati, I didn’t want to leave. Zim was really upset,” Guenther says with a chuckle. “We didn’t talk for a little while there, but everything’s fine now.”

Four years later, as the 2017 season wrapped up, Guenther evaluated the Bengals’ landscape. Lewis was rumored to be on his way out. Some assistants’ contracts, including Guenther’s, were expiring. Changes were looming.

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Oakland Raiders

On New Year’s Eve, the Bengals finished their season with an upset win at Baltimore. Gruden was being linked to the Raiders job, and over the next few days Guenther started evaluating Oakland’s defense. It featured Khalil Mack, but also had a lot of needs. Gruden was contacting Guenther 15 times a day, going over possible assistants, schematic approaches, but, mostly pressing Guenther on whether he was “in or out.” If Guenther was out, Gruden needed to quickly find someone else.

But Guenther was waiting for the decision on Lewis. The Bengals are known to promote from within; if their 15-year head coach did not return, Guenther was a candidate to replace him.

Finally, on January 2, it was announced that Lewis would be back. Guenther told him about his opportunity in Oakland. Lewis and Bengals ownership offered him a long-term contract and pay raise, but Guenther decided it was time for a change.

With Gruden on an unprecedented 10-year deal, the Raiders, even with a move to Vegas upcoming, had a more stable situation. Plus Gruden is an offensive guy; in many respects, Guenther would be the de facto defensive head coach. He’d had a similar role in Cincinnati, though that wasn’t the perception given Lewis’s background as a defensive coordinator.

“It was nothing against Cincinnati—I love that organization, I love those players, Marvin was great to me,” Guenther says. “It was just an opportunity to go somewhere else and see someone else do a head coaching job. Jon’s very unique in the way he runs things, it’s very different than what I was used to.”

Guenther told his two sons—Jake, 14 and Duke, 12—about the move, and on January 5 he officially became Oakland’s new defensive coordinator. The family that had only known Cincinnati would be moving 2,400 miles west.

“I’ve never really lived on the West Coast,” says Guenther, who hails from the Philadelphia area. “It was a total flip in lifestyle.”

On January 9, Paul and Patrice Guenther were in Oakland for Gruden’s introductory press conference. No team takes better care of its alumni than the Raiders, and that press conference had 10 Hall of Famers on-hand. It bordered on electrifying.

The next day, Guenther and Gruden checked into rooms at a Hampton Inn just down the street from the Raiders’ facility. For the next two weeks they interviewed assistant coaches. The Raiders’ facility is adjacent to the Oakland Airport, so candidates could be shuffled in every two hours. Gruden and Guenther would get in around 6 a.m. and interview candidates from 7 a.m. until 9 p.m.

Quality candidates can be hard to find; you’re limited to guys who are not under contract with other teams. “It’s guys you’ve met before, or someone we’ve already hired on staff has worked with the guy,” says Guenther. “Sometimes the coach is recommended. Sometimes you look at his team’s tape and say, ‘I remember they had a really good D-line there, or I remember those cornerbacks looking really well-coached. Let’s bring that coach in if he’s available.’”

Those first three days, whenever an assistant candidate was not being interviewed, Guenther was out with Patrice and their realtor looking for a house. Patrice had casually researched East Bay neighborhoods after her husband’s dinner with Gruden.

They found a place in Danville, Calif. It’s near a golf course—a plus given Jake's avidity for golf. Gruden was planning on living in Pleasanton, where he’d been in his first stint with the Raiders, but wound up renting a house a few doors down after Guenther told him about the subdivision. Now the two carpool to work.

There’s minimal traffic at 4 a.m., but it’s a chance for the head coach and coordinator to meet uninterrupted. Their driver is Jeff Leonardo, who used to drive AC/DC’s tour bus and, more recently, Gruden’s Monday Night bus.

“Jeff always says, ‘Man I would love to have a camera in the car, like in Taxi Cab confessions,’” says Guenther. There’s an animated camaraderie and good-natured combativeness to those discussions, especially when Gruden and Guenther are debating players, and even more especially when they’re debating non-football topics.

Guenther stayed in Oakland until March 1, when he went to the NFL combine in Indianapolis. Afterward, he drove two hours to his now-former home in Indian Hill, Ohio and picked up his wife and sons, who had everything ready for the movers.

They flew together to their new home in California. Guenther had only seen his family once since early January. That’s because, after finalizing the coaching staff by the end of January, he spent February teaching those coaches his system. It’s a zone-based system known for it’s two-deep coverages and creative third-down blitzes.

“This is the third time as a coordinator I’ve done this,” Guenther explains. “My first year as a coordinator Vance Joseph was the defensive backs coach and Matt Burke was the linebackers coach. Jay Hayes was the D-line coach, he was the lone holdover.

I had to teach Matt and Vance the backend stuff, the run fits, the coverages and all the details that go with it.” After the Bengals had a strong defense in 2015, Joseph left for the defensive coordinator job in Miami and Burke followed as his linebackers coach. So, in 2016, Guenther had to reinstall the system for new defensive backs coach Kevin Coyle and linebackers coach Jim Haslett.

A lot goes into teaching a coaching staff your system. For starters, coaches must know the purely schematic parts—in other words, the plays you call and the looks you give. These are written on the white board in the Raiders’ defensive meeting room, which doubles as Guenther’s office. The scheme features:

14 different D-line fronts
14 stunts and twists
15 coverages
20 blitzes out of a four-down front
26 blitzes out of double-A-gap fronts
19 blitzes out of “odd” fronts, which have either three or five men across the D-line, with one aligned directly over the center

There are also options for facing unusual offensive looks like four-receiver sets and wildcat. Plus there are 10-12 red zone packages and 18 end-of-game packages.

Many of these categories can be mixed and matched in different ways. And those mixings and matchings present different wrinkles. All assistant coaches must know not just the various wrinkles and base concepts, but how to teach them to players. The variables are infinite—trying to go over each one, Guenther says, would be like trying to pinpoint every place along a fairway and rough that a golf ball might land.

And so Guenther not only wants unified verbiage, with everyone calling everything the same thing, he wants many of the instructions unified. For example, Guenther told his coaches to have cornerbacks “kick-slide and not let the receiver go untouched.” A coach who tells a cornerback to just press and kick-slide is wrong; he must say, “Kick-slide and not let the receiver go untouched.” The more unified the verbiage, the easier it is to teach and learn deviated concepts.

All items are covered here. “I come in and I go on this board for about a week,” Guenther explains. “I’ll go through fronts; stances, alignments and initial keys; initial movements; run-pass responsibilities; how and where each player physically stands, be it a cornerback, nose tackle, etc. We do this for every defensive package, every formation. I take at least a week just to go through our base alignments.”

After the base stuff, it’s on to coverage. Then blitzes.

After that, Guenther and his coaches do the whole thing over again, this time a little faster. That’s Phase 2. In Phase 3, coaches are called up to the board to teach this stuff themselves. By then, it’s mid-March. With the weather a little nicer, the coaches go outside and walk through everything, with cameras and microphones recording it. This three-phase process follows a similar pattern that the Raiders use for players on OTAs.

Speaking of players, Guenther and his assistants still had to learn theirs. They’d hold the daily system installation meetings from 7 a.m. until 3 p.m. The late afternoons and evenings were spent watching film on Oakland’s defense.

Defensive coaches know everything about the players they coach and the offensive players they’ve faced in the last year or two. But they don’t have enough time to be fully up on defenders from other teams, so Guenther and his staff initially had just a surface level familiarity with the Raiders.

After watching all of the 2017 Raider games, Guenther watched every snap for each incumbent defender. He also watched practice snaps from early in the year and late in the year, looking to see if a player’s effort stayed high after the Raiders were eliminated. He watched in mostly chronological order, taking notes as he went.

Some players were easy. Khalil Mack, for example. Though Guenther believes the 27-year-old perennial Pro Bowler can get better, he didn’t obsess over Mack’s film. “We still want him,” Guenther says dryly.

Other players took more time. Nose tackle Justin Ellis was scheduled for free agency. Guenther watched him closer because the Raiders had to determine at what price they’d offer to re-sign him. (They got him for $13.5 million over three years.)

Guenther will write reports on each film study and give it to the player. “I can say to them, ‘I’m going to know you very well here soon, but right now, I don’t personally know you. So this is an independent evaluation of your play.’”

That self-scouting process revealed holes in the depth chart, which set the blueprint for Oakland’s free agency plans. Guenther watched extensive film on free agents at positions of glaring need. “You make a list of five or six guys at each position that you want to pursue,” he explains.

“You have to understand what we can afford. Our cap guys try to give us an idea of that.” That’s very much a moving target. Remember: Every player the Raiders studied was reviewed by 31 other teams. That’s a lot of potential bidders, with a lot of opportunity for players to suddenly leave the market.

One position of significant need was linebacker. Guenther watched film on the top free agent linebackers, with his fellow defensive assistants and even offensive assistants eventually joining in. After that, “if you really like a guy, you bring him in and test his knowledge. If it’s a match, you try not to let him out of the building.” One linebacker Oakland really liked was former Lion Tahir Whitehead, who visited on the first full day of free agency and left with a three-year deal worth $19 million.

Not every team involves its coaches so extensively in scouting, but it was a familiar process for Guenther. The Bengals have one of the NFL’s smallest front offices and ask assistant coaches to do a lot of scouting.

That experience proved invaluable because, while reviewing his own team and upcoming free agents, Guenther also had to prepare for the combine. That meant hundreds of draft prospects to learn. To assuage that burden, Guenther starts this process during the previous year’s summer break. This late June/early July he’ll vacation at his place on Jersey Shore; after about a week he’ll grow bored with sitting on the beach and spend two hours a day watching 2019 draft prospects.

These pre-draft scouting reports can have major implications. Not only do they determine a player’s draft status, they help set the foundation for his attractiveness in free agency four or five years later. This is especially true for middle- and lower-tier players. The reports also contribute to the way your team prepares to face that player in the pros.

Plus, for the coach personally, it can factor into future job decisions. When Guenther was contemplating Gruden’s offer, he had to take the plunge before he could get through all of the Raiders film. His scouting reports from when Oakland players entered the NFL factored into how he felt about the defense as a whole.

Position coaches write their own reports, too, and Guenther will frequently compare notes. “I won’t always tell them my opinion on a player at first,” he says. “I might say I like a player who I actually hate, just to see if the coach really knows [what we’re looking for] or if he’ll just agree with me.”

When April rolled around, the coaching staff was intact and fully up on the scheme, incumbent players had been evaluated and major free agents had been signed. There was finally enough time to focus fully on the draft. Guenther and his position coaches corroborated their pre-draft reports, with each man putting a grade on each player. The grades were broken into three parts per round: A, B and C.

A player with a 1A grade, for example, is worth taking in the top third of the first round. A 1C grade means bottom third of the first round. A 3B grade would be for the middle part of the third round.

Once prospects were graded, Guenther and his staff evaluated them across positions. Human nature says the defensive line coach’s 1B grade will carry a slightly different criteria than, say, the linebacker coach’s 1B grade. Plus, with different positions, those grades don’t fully relate to one another. To work through this, the entire staff would watch that 1B defensive lineman together, and then that 1B linebacker. Then, they’d re-grade the players.

They went this far for dozens of prospects, and nearly this far for hundreds more. And yet, a typical draft will yield just 1-6 players defensively. Those ancillary benefits of scouting—knowing about players who will now be on other teams, who will be free agents down the road or who will comprise the roster you might one day have to decide whether or not to coach—removes some of the inevitable sting of a defensive coordinator not getting prospects he wanted.

The Raiders entered the draft with needs at cornerback, linebacker, defensive tackle and safety. But with two of their first three picks, Gruden selected offensive tackles.

Guenther gets it. “We’re going to go as far as Derek Carr takes us,” he says. “Donald Penn is getting up there in age and we need some young tackles.” He’s also quick to point out that third-round edge player Arden Key and fifth-round defensive tackle Maurice Hurst were both ranked by his staff as top-five at their respective positions.

After the draft, those new players, be it rookies or free agents, showed up for OTAs and started learning the scheme much like the coaches did months before. Their progress is constantly monitored. On another wall in the defensive meeting room, across from the list of defensive packages, is a depth chart comprised of players’ names on magnets.

Guenther marvels at how more than 25 names up there now are first-year Raiders. “It’s basically a half-new roster,” he says. It’s pointed out to him that one of those names is Senquez Golson, the former Steelers second-round pick who lasted just a few weeks in Oakland before being cut on May 23. “Oh, yep, gotta take Senquez off,” Guenther says, dropping the magnet into a bin of markers and erasers.

Phase 1 and Phase 2 OTAs were in late May. The coaches would hold morning meetings with the players and install the defense. That would be followed by position group meetings, then a walk-through. Whatever was installed in that walkthrough is then executed at full speed, then against the Raiders offense. The NFL limits these sessions to 90 minutes on the field and two hours for players at the facility (this does not include the two hours players can spend working out off the field).

There’s little time for players to review their practice on film. Phase 3 OTAs, which allow for six total hours instead of four, offer more all-encompassing learning opportunities, and minicamp, which was June 12-14, allowed for players to be at work for 10 hours.

The meetings where players learn the scheme present another opportunity for the coaches to relearn the scheme, and a first opportunity to truly teach it. That’ll be important come training camp, when everyone must hit the ground running and not stop until New Years—or beyond, for the teams that do it best.
 

Merlin

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26 blitzes out of double-A-gap fronts

I have always admired the A gap pressures that defense produces. Just like the outside technique they push with the CBs to funnel action to the middle. It's a great defensive scheme and one of the reasons why the Vikes get so much production out of a front that is good but whose sum is greater than the parts.

Of course we have a pretty damn good scheme and DC ourselves and hopefully it causes Gruden and company to have a rough start to the season... (y)
 

OldSchool

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Hmmm.....Not sure about that, Gruden did hire an excellent DC in Paul Gunther the big question is, how is Gruden going to be able to relate to a younger players? Rams play the Raiders in the first game of the year, I will refrain from judgment, until that game is over.
His DC hire though is negated by hiring Tom Cable.