Clumsy end to McKenzie saga
The Raiders’ awkward, year-long dance with Reggie McKenzie has ended.
McKenzie was fired by team owner Mark Davis on Sunday evening, almost a full year after Jon Gruden’s hiring appeared to render McKenzie’s job superfluous. That silliness had gone on long enough, to the detriment of the team.
And now commences a different silliness, another awkward dance, as the Raiders transition to a new general manager, or whatever they might call the person who replaces McKenzie.
“He left some big shoes to fill,” Gruden said Monday of McKenzie. Which leads to speculation that McKenzie was ushered out of the Raiders’ headquarters so quickly he didn’t have time to put on his shoes.
“This is all somewhat surprising,” Gruden said at his weekly news conference.
“There’s been a lot of speculation and lot of rumors coming out of here early in the season. You don’t know what’s real, what’s smoke, what’s fire. You really don’t.”
One way you could find out, if you’re Gruden: Ask Davis, who hired you for $100 million over 10 years. The assistant hedge-pruner at Raiders HQ in Alameda might be in the dark about McKenzie, but Gruden is higher on the food chain.
The suspicion here is that Gruden knows more about hirings and firings — and has more input in those matters — than he lets on.
McKenzie’s departure doesn’t exactly bring the Raiders’ picture into focus.
Gruden, asked if he will be involved in the process of picking the next GM, said, “Don’t know. Don’t know.”
Let me answer that one: Yes. Yes.
To be determined: What that new person’s title and duties will be.
Asked who will be making the final decisions on (for instance) the Raiders’ three firstround draft picks, Gruden said, “I think it’s a collaboration around the league. I think the general manager, the scouts, the coaching staff and sometimes the owner all work together in every selection.”
That’s a modern sportsspeak fib. The buck has to stop somewhere, and the guess here is that it stops with Gruden, and will do so unless the new person comes in at a higher salary.
Awkward. Davis fires a GM who drafted three elite-level players, two of whom recently were traded and are playing brilliantly elsewhere. The current GM void leaves Gruden as king of the draft selections, and when he coached the Buccaneers, he had a mediocre track record at that.
And incidentally, Gruden already has one full-time job.
Davis’ close friendship with McKenzie might have kept the owner from firing or re-assigning his GM in January. However friendly McKenzie and Gruden became, they were an odd couple from the start. They seemed to have different football tastes, and personal styles. McKenzie is laconic and somewhat reclusive, Gruden is Gruden.
“It takes Reggie 10 minutes to get out of his chair,” said Greg Papa, former Raiders play-byplay announcer, on his 95.7 FM show Monday. “Meanwhile, Gruden’s up on his desk, dancing.”
By having McKenzie more or less lame-duck it for almost a year, the Raiders did a lot of counterproductive wheelspinning while promoting the illusion that McKenzie was the real GM.
Will the wheel-spinning stop now?
The Raiders at the top are a mess, or at least a muddle.
Davis was not groomed for the job of owning the team and is still learning on the fly. He needs a strong football front man, which is typically the role of the general manager.
Now the team either won’t have a general manager, or will have a GM lite. As the late Casey Stengel might have said, it gets awkwarder and awkwarder. Scott Ostler is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: sostler@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @scottostler