Recapping the 2018/19 NFL season

#7 The Raiders better get this draft right

Jon Gruden

Jon Gruden has been the laughing stock for a bunch of fans with what he has done in his first season back as a coach and while there probably is a genius behind all that madness, the draft in a couple of months better end with two or three elite players on their team.

The building of the new roster heading into last offseason was a unique and a little weird one. The Oakland Raiders released productive veterans in wide receiver Michael Crabtree and punter Marquette King and put together a highly questionable draft class, that I think contains a couple of really talented guys in Arden Key and Maurice Hurst, whose draft stock fell due to off-the-field and health concerns respectively.

However, I thought they definitely reached on their first three picks, highlighted by the selection of UCLA’s Kolton Miller, who went on to surrender a league-high 14 sacks as a rookie. Yet the biggest move was still ahead of them, as they traded away franchise cornerstone Khalil Mack basically for two first-round picks.

While there is speculation that management ultimately wouldn’t have wanted to pay Mack anyway, trading an elite player like him in the middle of his prime is unprecedented, especially at a highly touted position.

That was only magnified by the following comments of Gruden saying “good pass rushers are hard to find” and the fact the Silver and Black finished with a horrendous 13 sacks, which obviously ranked dead-last as the team ahead of them collected 30.

Another surprising move happened at the trade deadline, when receiver Amari Cooper was shipped to Dallas despite the connection he had built with Derek Carr and some of the promise he had shown. Coop caught 53 passes for 725 yards and six touchdowns in nine games as a Cowboy.

While I understood that deal more considering the inconsistencies he had shown since the start of the 2017 campaign and that the reward was another first-round pick, some of the blame for his lack of production has to be put on that coaching staff.

With all that being said, Gruden combined with his new GM Mike Mayock now have three first-round selections in this upcoming draft and it will be up to those to make up for their losses. If they don’t drastically improve, this whole experiment might go down the wrong way.

Of course there are a bunch of other questions with the Raiders, starting with where they’ll play this year, but these picks might define their future.