State of the Raiders 10/23

State of the Raiders... Why write about it when I can just sum it up in two photos.

Gruden has embodied Negan. From now on I will only envision him addressing his team wielding Lucille and the swagger of Negan as he slowly paces back and forth... reciting "eeny... meeny... miny... moe" to decide who is next to be traded, cut, or burned with an iron.

Reggie McKenzie is now Dwight. Gruden's right hand man. Publicly loyal, but harbors a secret hatred of Gruden because Gruden asserted his dominance by eliminating every player McKenzie brought in, then banged his wife, and burned half his face off.

Mark Davis is Gregory the former governor of Hill Top. Appears to be in power, but is useless outside of haircut memes.

The Raiders are done tip toeing and have high dived into full rebuild mode. As a Raiders fan all I can do is laugh at this point. After one season of hope the Raiders are right back to where they have resided for better part of the last fifteen years... an embarrassment of a professional sports organization. Jon Gruden has burned this team to the ground in 10 months.

There is still plenty of fat that should be cut from this roster to complete the purge, but not nearly the same headline names. If you are flushing out Mack and Cooper, young players with talent, you should be immediately canning Irvin, Gabe Jackson, Justin Ellis, Reggie Nelson, Donald Penn (realistically probably played his last down, but why let him leave on his own terms when you can have the satisfaction of firing him) Karl Joseph, to me is skating on thin ice too. He hasn't looked like a 1st round pick since entering the NFL as a 14th overall pick, but I'd be ok keeping him around for one more year. They say Derrick Carr is "safe"... but they said they weren’t trading Mack... then they said they weren't trading Cooper... So clearly they have no problem, and are quite good at, lying their asses off. I do believe Carr is safe for now. His contract would be a large bite to take at the moment. However, I predict that with all of the draft capital they have acquired... they draft a QB early in 2019 or 2020. When I addressed the state of the Raiders a few weeks ago I said that Carr has been shaken past the point of repair. That was evidenced by him being literally beaten to tears in London against Seattle. I think Gruden will dump Carr at the first sniff of a potential franchise QB in the draft.

The one glimmer of hope? Five 1st round draft picks over the next two drafts. That is some Madden type shit. However... mark my words. This team will remain a hot pile of garbage until this organization figures out how to scout college football players, and draft using more than a magic eight ball. Five 1st round picks won't mean diddly if they draft five more Kolton Miller-esk busts. The Raiders draft classes have been absolutely putrid for a long time and oddly enough when they hit on a pick their strategy is to dump the player in the last year of their rookie contracts. I guess it is so rare for them to draft a good player that they don't know what to do? Maybe they don't know that you can resign players? They got a Khalil Mack... but what they really wanted was another DJ Hayden. I'll go into more detail about the drafting disasters this franchise has racked up closer to the next draft.

So here we are seven weeks into the season and for the Raiders, it's a wrap. Stick a fork in them, because they are done. And the Raider Nation? We are once again left to sit through a long winter, spring, and summer waiting for the chance at meaningful football. We are once again the butt of NFL jokes. We are once again lost in a black hole.

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