In most organizations, the idea of the General Manager making the call on personnel decisions would kind of go without saying. It’s like ‘well, yeah, that’s his job.’ But that hasn’t been the case with the Raiders the last few years and it’s led to some disastrous personnel decisions.
That was with Jon Gruden as head coach and Mike Mayock as GM. Mayock seemed at times to be almost more of a consultant while Gruden overruled him. And if that wasn’t the case, there was never really any indication otherwise. The result was playing fast and loose with trades and taking big risks — Vontaze Burfict, Antonio Brown, Trent Brown — and seemingly always getting bitten by it.
It was hard to know who was really to blame. Overall it was just a confusing time that needed to end. And end it did as Gruden was forced to resign midway through last season and Mayock was let go this offseason.
Enter Dave Ziegler as the new GM and Josh McDaniels as head coach. And with them some sense of how a normal NFL chain of command should sound like.
“At the end of the day as the general manager and as the one leading the charge on the scouting side and personnel and college and pro, that direction will come from me in terms of the construction of the roster,” said Ziegler at his introductory press conference. “Obviously Josh and I are tied in many ways in our vision of how to build a team and our vision of what we want in terms of the players that we bring into the building is very connected. But at the end of the day when it’s time to make decisions on personnel, while we’re work together, those final decisions will be made by me.”
Those are not words we’ve heard much from Raiders brass. The team went from Al Davis who had absolute say in all things team-related, to several years of GMs trotting out the tired line about how every decision was going to be a team effort.
With the Patriots it was Bill Belichick he was the coach and General Manager. That is not the way the majority of teams are run, but it’s also not unusual. And it seems to be working out well for them.
In Ziegler’s nine years in New England, he learned how Belichick makes his decisions and it offers some insight into how Ziegler will approach each of his roster decisions.
“I would say the one thing that sticks out to me that Bill taught me is Bill is a forward thinker,” Ziegler said of Belichick. “It’s not just about a decision in the moment, it’s about how a decision can — one decision can impact four different things, one decision can impact what we’re going to do in 2022, in 2023, and just to have really an understanding of how decisions can impact different parts of the organization and can impact your team.”
You could look at the way the Raiders have been run for decades and say there hasn’t been a lot of forward-thinking.
Even with Reggie McKenzie in charge, it seems like his only goal was to gut the roster. Between that and having basically just one even moderately successful draft (2014) in his time as GM made it tough for the Raiders to find their way back to relevancy.
And what McKenzie was trying to gut from the team was the immense salaries that the team was on the hook for due to Al Davis going all out to try and win in his final years.
So, for most fans, their team having a GM with a normal role and a normal chain of command, if you will, is something they take for granted. But any Raiders fan can tell you, it’s a breath of fresh air around these parts.
