Raiders: Hit the road, Coach
CARSON » Jack Del Rio took a long time to arrive at his postgame press conference Sunday. A lot longer than usual. But Del Rio had a good reason — he had just been fired as the Raiders’ head coach.
Raiders owner Mark Davis told Del Rio he would not be retained for a fourth season moments after a lifeless 30-10 loss to the Chargers.
Del Rio called the season finale a microcosm of his team’s disappointing 6-10 season. Then he said Davis had fired him.
It didn’t matter that Davis signed Del Rio to a fouryear contract extension, believed to be worth around $20 million, in February — the Raiders’ owner made the right decision to fire Del Rio. While it might be hard to believe after watching the 2017 season, the truth is that the Raiders are in a middle of a title window.
That window won’t last forever, and the Raiders just wasted a season of Derek Carr, Khalil Mack, Amari Cooper and a solid offensive line.
It wasn’t solely Del Rio’s fault,
but he was the man in charge of a squandered season. Oakland lost its final four games.
The 2017 season highlighted a truth the Raiders were too blinded by newfound success to realize last season: Del Rio was not going to get this team to the Super Bowl.
The Raiders will now, in all likelihood, hire former coach Jon Gruden. Davis has wanted to re-hire Gruden — who coached the Raiders from 1998 to 2001 — for years, and the ESPN announcer is both available and seriously interested in returning to coaching.
Whether it’s Gruden or someone else, the next coach of the Raiders will come in with a mandate to turn the Raiders into true title contenders before they head to Las Vegas.
The Raiders were supposed to be title contenders this year. They were a trendy pick before the season started, and Del Rio and his players had no problem stoking that fire.
It was hard to blame them — the Raiders won 12 games in 2016. And while some wins were fluky (the Raiders had seven game-winning drives last year — an unsustainable number) the team showed that it had enough talent to compete with anyone in the AFC.
For the Raiders to be
out of contention for the playoffs in the last week of the season spoke volumes about Del Rio’s impact.
Everyone involved with the Raiders knows that success is fleeting: After the team lost the Super Bowl at the end of the 2002 season, they went 4-12 and didn’t make the playoffs again until 2016.
But it was the manner in which the Raiders regressed this year that was downright unforgivable.
The Raiders are a good team — still true despite a 6-10 season — but Sunday’s game was a microcosm of Del Rio’s final season, just as the outgoing head coach said.
The Raiders were outclassed by the Chargers. Oakland lacked poise ...
and fire. When the Chargers started putting points on the board and things became challenging, the Raiders had no interest in pushing back.
The Raiders’ players had to know that Del Rio was on a hot seat — there were too many Jon Gruden rumors floating around — and instead of rallying around their coach and his staff, they turned in a performance that couldn’t be misinterpreted.
The Raiders quit on their head coach.
Davis doesn’t like eating money — he’ll have to honor Del Rio’s contract, even after firing him — but his hand was forced. How could Davis bring Del Rio back after Sunday’s game?
After Del Rio had the
class to announce his own firing — Davis scurried from the Stubhub Center while Del Rio spoke, only commenting in a news release an hour after Del Rio relayed the decision — his players hardly looked affected.
In fact, that should tell you everything.
Del Rio deserves credit — before he arrived in Oakland, the Raiders would have looked at a 6-10 season as a positive.
Del Rio converted a laughingstock into a team that was overhyped. That’s admirable.
But Del Rio has never shown the capability to take a good team — whether at his previous stop in Jacksonville (where he didn’t win a division title
in nine years) or Oakland — and make it great.
One has to wonder if he’ll get another chance.
Davis couldn’t wait to find out. The Raiders are still planning to move to Las Vegas in 2020 and the team needs to be a bona fide contender — Davis has taken out roughly $850 million in loans for the new Las Vegas stadium, and he’ll need to sell everything he can to pay those loans back. (It’s easier to sell a contender.)
Will Gruden (or anyone else) make that happen? No one can say with certainty.
But after watching the 2017 season, we can say this with certainty: With everything at stake, the Raiders couldn’t risk another season with Del Rio in charge.