The Raiders will kick off their regular season on Monday Night Football against the Ravens tomorrow. In the meantime, let’s round up a few recent items on the Silver-and-Black:
- The 2020 wide receiver draft class was absolutely loaded, and plenty of pundits believed Jerry Jeudy was the cream of the crop. Although no WR had been selected by the time the Raiders were on the board with the No. 12 overall pick, Las Vegas ultimately chose Henry Ruggs over Jeudy and CeeDee Lamb. As Vic Tafur of The Athletic writes, there were Jeudy supporters in the Raiders’ war room, but head coach Jon Gruden wanted his own version of Tyreek Hill, and he saw Ruggs as a player who fit that bill.
- The Raiders selected DE Arden Key, who was once believed to be a first-round talent, in the third round of the 2018 draft. But the LSU product posted just three sacks in three seasons, and Vegas deemed him surplus to requirements in April. He was quickly scooped up by the 49ers, and he did not mince words when asked about his time with the Raiders. “To be honest, I wanted to get out of there,” Key said (via Jacob Hutchinson of KNBR.com). “I been wanting to get out of there. I wasn’t surprised. I was more happy than surprised. I wish it happened a little earlier but, hey, I got what I wanted and I’m good.” Key went on to say that the Raiders’ defensive scheme was a poor fit for him, and while he did not explicitly say so, it seems he is happy to be away from Gruden.
- Count Lamarcus Joyner as another ex-Raider who is happy to be away from the club. The Raiders deployed Joyner — who primarily played safety with the Rams before signing a big-money free agent contract with Vegas — as a nickelback over the past several seasons, and he struggled in that role. The Raiders released him in March, and he signed with the Jets 10 days later. Gang Green will deploy him as single-high safety, and he is pleased with how things turned out. “I’m pretty sure the whole world knows that (I’m happy to be away from the Raiders),” he said. “I made that known. I’m so happy it’s over and I’m here with coach [Robert] Saleh right now” (via Rich Cimini of ESPN.com). Joyner was clear that he didn’t have an issue with Gruden personally.
About time for Jon to get to 500, but I don’t see it. KC & LA are better teams.
Gruden is the real and well-known problem (historical terrible decisions-maker).. He prefer to feed up his ego and be on headlines than creating and coaching a team (on the draft he prefers to shock media with weird choices).. He is one of the worst and a crazy long contract is another strange choice of the owner
They can complain about the raiders all they want but they were absolutely terrible lol
In Joyner’s case, he has a good argument. As a safety with St. Louis, he was very, very good. You could see in Oakland and Vegas that he was clearly deployed out of position. Even if we believed that he was not very good, once Joyner began obviously struggling, any reasonable coach would have put him back in the position that he played best-safety. For some reason they chose to deliberately not do that, even when they had injuries at the position.
On top of that, the Raiders kept selecting safeties with valuable picks. To be fair to Gruden, this seems like a failure of the defensive coaching staff, but he still probably should have stepped in to use Joyner in a way that best benefitted the team.