Oakland Raiders: A few of the worst moves of the Jon Gruden 2.0 era

Hiring Tom Cable

There were a lot of reasons bringing Tom Cable back should have been a non-starter – the most prominent being that Cable not a very good coach. He wasn’t a good head coach and he isn’t a very good offensive line coach.

Quarterbacks in the league, they say, get far too much credit when things are going well. Probably so. But Cable is getting far too much credit as a solid offensive line coach over his time with Seattle. Cable benefited greatly from the presence of an in his prime Marshawn Lynch and some real talent up front.

But when that talent started to fade out and Lynch was no longer with the Seahawks, Seattle’s once formidable running game – a unit that helped lead them to back-to-back Super Bowl appearances, and within a yard of back-to-back titles – faded out as well.

Seattle’s ground game, once the most potent and physical in the NFL, dropped from the top of the league, all the way down to the bottom half of the league in Cable’s last season in the Pacific Northwest. (2017).

Despite that steady decline in performance, and him proving that he can’t coach his guys up real well, Gruden brought Cable on board anyway. And the Raiders have paid the price for Cable’s shortcomings as a coach.

Cable has taken what used to be an elite unit – once, one of the very best units in the entire league – and turned them into human turnstiles. That’s a fact that the 35 sacks quarterback Derek Carr has taken on the year can attest to. It’s the most sacks he’s taken in any one season he’s been in the league – and there are still five games to go.

To be perfectly fair, this unit started to lose its way last year when the terminally incompetent Todd Downing took over the offense and decided to mix things up, so he could put his own stamp on it. This is a group of maulers, but they moved away from the power blocking scheme that made them so effective in both the run game and in pass protection – a change in philosophy that has continued under Cable, to the detriment of the team as a whole.

Injuries have also taken a toll on this unit this year. That’s not Cable’s fault, of course. What is his fault though, is not coaching up the guys behind the starters to be prepared, be ready, and be effective when they get the call.

Oakland’s offense is a Chernobyl-level disaster and much of the blame starts up front, with a unit that has more in common with Spanish matadors, than it does an actual NFL offensive line.