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Jon Gruden's return to the Raiders, but he kind of looks smart in his "approach to the ground" Raiders' roster as the team moves from Oakland to Las Vegas.
NFL draft: Oakland is 1-5 after an embarrassing loss to the Seahawks in London during Week 6, but the team is still struggling to win the first time. best players.
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The Amari Cooper trade is just the latest example of this, with the Raiders shipping their top receiver to the Cowboys. The catch here, though, is the Raiders somehow dragged a first-round pick of Dallas in the deal. When rumors circulated the Raiders wanted a first in a swap for Cooperit was laughable. No one was going to give them a first-round pick for a semi-productive receiver with a year and change of control left, especially after he suffered a concussion in his team's last game.
Enter Jerry Jones, who has a penchant for this sort of thing.
Jerry claims he's made "a lot worse mistakes" than the Roy Williams deal back in 2008, but there's an argument it was his worst trade ever. Considering the value of first-round picks and the obvious contract Cowboys need to give a new lease of life.
If the Cowboys, now 3-4 after their Week 6 loss to the Redskins, do not make a run at the playoffs, they could end up handing the Raiders to a pretty high draft pick.
Which is exactly what? Gruden's banking? Reputed by Raiders in his image. This is now Gruden's dealt a star / superstar player in exchange for first-round pick (s).
First there was the Khalil Mack trade, which has been won by the Raiders in 2019 and 2020. At the time, even the staunchest Mack supporters agreed the Raiders did a nice job picking up assets from Chicago, trading someone who has earned a Defensive Player of the Year award on his rookie contract can best be described as sub-optimal. It felt like performance performance art watching Gruden long public for a pass rusher after each Raiders loss while Mack terrorized NFL quarterbacks on a weekly basis.
The Cooper Deal is a lot easier to parse: Gruden fleeced the Cowboys in this one, somehow convincing Jerry Jones to give him a first-round pick for a wide receiver With $ 20 million in 2019 on his fifth-year option.
And now Gruden has a massive stack of metaphorical poker chips sitting in front of him. He has five – count them, FIVE – first – round picks at his disposal over the next two years. The 2019 picks are looking pretty good too, thanks to the Bears (3-3) and Cowboys (3-4) struggling.
If the season ended today, the Raiders would have the fourth-overall pick, the 10th-overall pick (Dallas courtesy) and the 17th-overall pick (via Chicago).
In theory the Cowboys pick to get "worse" (for Oakland) because they added Cooper, but the Cowboys have a tough schedule of their bye. They draw the Titans, Eagles (road), Falcons (road), Redskins, Saints and Eagles out of their break. We're going to find out pretty soon if it was a good decision to swap Cooper for a high pick.
For Gruden, though, it was smart. Not only did it tell you another player The $ 100 Million man does not want to keep it around – there's a clear "if you were drafted by Reggie McKenzie, you're as good as gone" vibe to the Raiders right now – but it in the Raiders getting a massive asset in return.
More, as Brady Quinn pointed out on the Pick Six Podcast Tuesday (subscribe to get your daily dose of NFL podcast right here), the optics of the Cooper deal are massive because it offsets the optics of the Mack trade. Giving up Mack and badly needing a rush makes the Raiders look silly. Giving up both players and just being a bad football team while holding five first-round picks? That looks like someone has a plan.
The only losers in that plan, really, are Oakland Raiders fans. The diehard supporters of the Silver and Black in the Bay Area are watching their franchise, which has been broken down by the hiring of Gruden just a few months ago.
That's Gruden's map if it was not abundantly clear. Raiders land in their new Sin City home.
It's not dumb. It might be smart. By the time the Raiders get to Vegas, Mack was going to be edging towards 30. Cooper would only be 26, but he'd be on the beginning of a high-priced deal. Gruden now can have a core of players on the road to the world. Or maybe a year after. Whatever it is, it seems obvious the plan for Gruden all along is to try and get a youthful roster geared up for the move.
Watching it is painful and the Raiders might be stuck out loud for the next year or two. But if he executes it on the draft picks, it could turn out that he was playing a chess when we were all along he was a low-level checkers match.
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