It’s the flight to London that has Gruden jittery
The Raiders have a 1-4 record.
They have a completely weird plan for getting to Sunday’s game in London.
And, on top of everything else, their head coach hates to travel. Yet in the next week, he’ll take an 11,000-mile, 22hour round trip.
“I hope I can make it, honestly,” Jon Gruden said Monday. “I’m not great. Claustrophobic. My son was a weightlifter, he won a power-lifting championship in Belarus. I had to fly 14 hours. I had to fly home 14 hours. I had vertigo for a month. I couldn’t even lay down. The house was spinning. So I hope I don’t get vertigo.
“I’m not a great traveler. I’ll be honest. I hate it. I’m not good. So I’m concerned. I’m
more worried about that than the goal-line offense right now.”
The last point might be the only good news Derek Carr hears from his coach this week. And if the Raiders fall into a deeper morass for the next month, you’ll know why. It will be because the coach is spinning.
Let’s not even talk about the fans.
When the schedule was released, this week seemed like a really bad idea. The super exciting Gruden-led Raiders were giving up one of their final home games in Oakland to travel to London, where they would play Marshawn Lynch’s former team.
But now it’s not looking like such a bad idea to slip out of town, lick their wounds and see if maybe they can salvage a win against Seattle.
The last time the Raiders went to London, they metaphorically sent Dennis Allen through Anne Boleyn’s “Traitors Gate” of the Tower, chopping him out of his job. That’s not going to happen to Gruden — he’s guaranteed job security — but things are definitely going badly.
“Obviously, I’m a little depressed today,” Gruden said.
Is losing taking its toll on him?
“I just don’t like to lose,” Gruden said. “I think we have work to do. There’s not enough time in the day to do it. So I’m depressed. I’m tired. I want to win. I want to do better. We’ve got to get back to work here.”
Maybe it’s the “not enough time in the day” issue that led to the Raiders’ odd travel plans for London. Instead of leaving after Sunday night’s game, and spending the week practicing and playing in London, or even departing midweek, the Raiders are leaving Thursday night, arriving Friday afternoon. They will have only two days to get used to the eight-hour time change, which — even for most seasoned people — isn’t nearly enough.
This is Gruden’s first time coaching a regular-season game out of the country. The travel plan is thought to be unprecedented for a team from the West Coast going to London.
“Did a lot of research on it,” Gruden said, before quickly following with, “I don’t know much about it.”
“Doing the best thing for our players to get the proper preparation here, then go to London and get them the proper rest and acclamation and ready to play on Sunday.”
Gruden wasn’t really interested in analyzing whether these London games are a good idea for the NFL. He was still licking his wounds from Sunday’s loss to the Chargers.
“I think there are a lot of good things that happened yesterday,” he said, before rattling off, “The scoreboard was lousy. The field position was bad. We gave up some big plays, which was not good. Terrible interception in the end zone. Some negative things that are still resonating with me and Raider nation.”
Um, so the positive? He mentioned eight rookies playing.
“I’m going to continue to emphasize the good and do everything I can to fix the things that are bad,” Gruden said. “Because most of the things that are bad, my fingerprints are all over.”
He seemed especially irritated by two things. One is the Raiders’ minus-4 turnover margin for the season.
So how does Gruden think the Raiders can change that? Khalil Mack fans might want to avert their eyes from the next paragraph.
“It starts with pressuring the quarterback,” Gruden said. “We’ve got to get more pressure on the quarterback. We’ve got to force him to make some bad decisions, to make that guy unload the ball when he doesn’t want to. We’ve got to disrupt the timing.”
It’s like Gruden can’t help himself. He traded the best pass rusher in the game, baffling his critics and crushing the hopes of most of the fans, but all he talks about is his team’s lack of pass rush.
The other thing that continued to irritate Gruden on Monday was Carr’s interception in the end zone. Though Gruden (kind of ) took culpability, he was still fried.
“It turns out to be a horrible call,” Gruden said. “My opinion is it shouldn’t have been intercepted.”
Then, defending his horrible call of not handing the ball to Lynch, who can get 1 yard pretty much anytime he wants, Gruden trolled the opposing coach of this week’s game.
“We were down 20-3,” Gruden said. “It wasn’t the last play of the Super Bowl.” Take that, Pete Carroll! Because of the abbreviated stay, Gruden won’t have time to take in the Rosetta Stone or Westminster Abbey or Big Ben. (No, the Raiders are not playing the Steelers.) He’ll just grit his teeth, try to get through the flight, and hope his players are alert enough to compete.
“All the legal things I can take,” Gruden said of his plan for dealing with the flight.
These Raiders are driving a lot of folks to the same plan.