XPost: alt.sports.football.pro.oak-raiders, vegas.general, alt.california XPost: alt.politics.democrats.d
CARSON, Calif. — Jack Del Rio took a long time arrive at his
postgame press conference Sunday.
A lot longer than usual.
But Del Rio had a good reason for being tardy — he had just been
fired as the Raiders’ head coach.
Raiders owner Mark Davis told Del Rio he would not be retained
for a fourth season moments after a lifeless 30-10 loss to the
Chargers.
Del Rio called the Raiders’ season finale a microcosm of his
team’s disappointing 6-10 season. Then he said that Davis had
fired him.
It didn’t matter that Davis signed Del Rio to a four-year
contract extension, believed to be worth around $20 million, in
February — the Raiders’ owner made the right decision to fire
Del Rio.
While it might be hard to believe after watching the 2017
season, the truth is that the Raiders are in a middle of a title
window.
That window won’t last forever, and the Raiders just wasted a
season of Derek Carr, Khalil Mack, Amari Cooper, and a solid
offensive line.
It wasn’t solely Del Rio’s fault, but he was the man in charge
of a squandered season and did little to provide hope amid a
disappointing campaign. Oakland lost its final four games.
The 2017 season highlighted a truth the Raiders were too blinded
by newfound success to realize last season: Del Rio was not
going to get this team where it wanted to go — the Super Bowl.
The Raiders will now, in all likelihood, hire former coach Jon
Gruden to be the team’s next head coach. Davis has wanted to re-
hire Gruden — who coached the Raiders from 1998 to 2001 — for
years, and the ESPN announcer is both available and seriously
interested in returning to coaching.
Whether it’s Gruden or someone else, the next coach of the
Raiders will come in with a mandate to turn the Raiders into
true title contenders before they head to Las Vegas.
Remember, the Raiders were supposed to be title contenders this
year. They were a trendy pick to represent the AFC before the
season started, and Del Rio and his players had no problem
stoking that fire.
It was hard to blame them, the Raiders won 12 games in 2016. And
while some of those wins were flukey (the Raiders had seven game-
winning drives last year — an unsustainable number) the team
showed that it had enough talent to compete with anyone in the
AFC.
For the Raiders to not be in contention for the playoffs in the
last week of the season spoke volumes to Del Rio’s impact (or
lack thereof) on this team.
Everyone involved with the Raiders knows that success is
fleeting: after the team lost the Super Bowl at the end of the
2002 season, they went 4-12 and didn’t make the playoffs again
until 2016.
So to regress from 12 wins in 2016 to six wins in 2017 certainly
looks like a bad omen. But it was the manner in which the
Raiders’ regressed that was downright unforgivable.
The Raiders are a good team — that’s still true despite a 6-10
season — but Sunday’s game was indeed a microcosm of Del Rio’s
final season in charge of the team, just as the outgoing head
coach said.
The Raiders were wholly outclassed by the Chargers. Oakland
lacked poise, but they had no fire. They showed flashes of
prodigious talent, but couldn’t put it all together on the vast
majority of plays, and, then, when the Chargers started putting
points on the board and things became challenging, the Raiders
had no interest in pushing back.
The Raiders’ players had to know that Del Rio was sitting on a
hot seat — there were too many Jon Gruden rumors floating around
to ignore — and instead of rallying around their head coach and
his coaching staff, they turned in a performance that couldn’t
be misinterpreted.
The Raiders quit on their head coach.
Davis doesn’t like eating money — he’ll have to honor Del Rio’s
contract, even after firing him — but his hand was forced on
Sunday.
How could Davis bring Del Rio back after Sunday’s game?
And it shouldn’t come as any surprise that after Del Rio had the
class to announce his own firing — Davis scurried out of the
Stubhub Center while Del Rio spoke, only commenting in a press
release an hour after Del Rio relayed the decision — his players
hardly looked affected.
In fact, that should tell you everything.
Del Rio deserves credit for his time in charge — before he
arrived in Oakland, the Raiders would have looked at a 6-10
season as a positive.
Del Rio took a bad team and made it good. He turned a
laughingstock into a team that was overhyped. That’s admirable.
But Del Rio has never shown the capability to take a good team —
whether that was at his previous stop in Jacksonville (where he
didn’t win a division title in nine years) or in Oakland — and
make it great.
One has to wonder if he’ll ever get another chance at it.
Davis couldn’t wait to find out. The Raiders are still planning
to move to Las Vegas in 2020 and the team needs to be a bonafide
contender heading into that season — Davis has taken out roughly
$850 million in loans for the new Las Vegas stadium and he’ll
need to sell everything he can to pay those loans back. (It’s a
lot easier to sell a contender.)
Will Gruden (or anyone else) make that happen? No one can say
with certainty.
But after watching the 2017 season, we can say this with
certainty: with everything at stake, the Raiders couldn’t risk
another season with Del Rio in charge.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/12/31/jack-del-rio-fired-jon- gruden-oakland-raiders-rumors-news-salary-coaching-search- candidates-replacement-2017-2018-john/
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