Oakland Raiders: Jon Gruden trying a Jimmy Johnson maneuver

The Oakland Raiders thought they were going back to the old days when they hired Jon Gruden to become their head coach for the second time.

They got what they wanted, just the wrong old days. This Raiders team looks like the lost groups from 2003 to 2013 when they had absolutely nothing going right. Everything was a mess. There was no defense. The offense had few weapons and a bad offensive line. Right now Derek Carr is their only notable talent and he’s steadily getting beaten into submission by opposing defenses and the ludicrous management of his head coach.

This begs the question. What in the hell is Jon Gruden trying to pull here? It’s not like he inherited a terrible team. The Raiders were 7-9 in 2017 and 12-4 the year before. If they could just find some more help on defense and maybe another weapon for Carr on offense? They would’ve been a team to watch this year. Instead, Gruden set the C4 explosives to the side of the ship and pressed the detonation switch when he traded Khalil Mack to Chicago.

Then he did it a second time by shipping Amari Cooper to Dallas just in case people didn’t get the message the first time. It’s becoming clear what he is aiming for. If you don’t know what that is, ask former head coach Jimmy Johnson.

Jon Gruden wants to use the Dallas Dynasty model from the 1990s

More from NFL Mocks

Being a man who came up in the 1990s with the Philadelphia Eagles and Green Bay Packers, Gruden was well aware of the greatness that was the Dallas Cowboys of that time. They were the gold standard of the NFL, winning three Super Bowls in four years from 1992 to 1995. The Eagles and Packers were often the teams they ran over to get there too. So Gruden had a front row seat.

The architect of that powerhouse was Johnson, and it started from humble beginnings. Recognizing he had a rather average roster at best when he arrived in 1989, Johnson began unloading tons of players. It became clear he wasn’t even trying to win by midseason when he traded star running back Herschel Walker to Minnesota. People thought he’d lost his mind.

There was a method to his madness though. Dallas got a bounty of draft picks in return for Walker and they used them in a series of moves over the next couple years to build a Hall of Fame-stacked roster that included Emmitt Smith and Charles Haley. Not to mention the fact they’d already secured Troy Aikman, and Michael Irvin along with several other Pro Bowlers. The rest is history.

Having already stockpiled three 1st round picks in 2019 and two in 2020, it’s clear Gruden is trying to follow that same model. He wants to rapidly rebuild the roster with players of his own choosing. The problem is this method is far from a guarantee. It depends entirely on Gruden picking good players with those picks. Other teams have collected huge caches of picks before and failed to do what Johnson did.

The Rams in 1987 and 2012 for the Eric Dickerson and Robert Griffin III trades. The Redskins in the Rickey Williams trade. This is not an exact science.

Home/NFL Hot Takes