On January 9, 2018, as the Raider Nation waited for Jon Gruden to be reintroduced at the Alameda, California, team facility, they were shown a montage from his first stint. He had brought the franchise back to relevance then. Funny enough, the clip ended with Gruden saying, “They’ve seen nothing yet.” Little did owner Mark Davis, who probably is just as guilty, know that the reality would soon become too hard to ignore.

You see, Davis – who took over the ownership after his father, Al, passed away in 2011 – chased Gruden for six years. He believed Gruden was the only one who could bring the then-Oakland team back to the Raiders Way. He handed him an unprecedented 10-year, $100 million contract and virtually unlimited access to the entire facility. For Davis, who didn’t know much about football or its operations, that became the biggest mistake, as revealed by The Athletic’s Zak Keefer.

“Gruden strolled through the doors in Oakland in 2018 with undisputed authority, and if he wasn’t in on a prospect, former staffers remember, he’d have one of his assistants compile a short video cut-up of the player’s worst snaps, then show it to all the scouts,” Keefer wrote.

“It wasn’t reflective of all the work you did,” a team source told Keefer. And it’s understandable how the team reached that point.

Owner Davis never involved himself in personnel decisions. Many former employees even said that he was as hands-off as they come, sleeping in most of the mornings. This was a stark difference from his father.

Al worked his way up the coaching ranks and served as the commissioner of the American Football League before he took the reins of the Raiders. But Mark, who didn’t know anything about football or its operations, was simply handed that team. And he only had one blueprint: to do things as his father did.

Gruden had established himself as the Raiders’ head coach in his first stint between 1998 and 2001 before Al traded him to the Bucs. The very next year, he won the Super Bowl over the Raiders. Then, as an ESPN analyst, he sold himself as a draft expert. That was all that Davis could see. That cost Davis everything.

Scouts take months to consider a prospect according to what the team needs to succeed. They would then narrow down their search through trips to the school, conversations with coaches, hours of game tape, Senior Bowl, NFL Combine, and pro day workouts, and much more. But all that work could be trampled upon with one snap of a finger. Gruden didn’t mind using that power.

He used “kill tapes”, as they were called in the building, to persuade the scout room and the executives away from the players he did not prefer. For most parts, it didn’t even have to do anything with the talent. These clips would be isolated poor plays and errors from draft prospects’ tape stitched together to make it look whole. To make it look like the prospect the scout team is looking to draft wasn’t worth it.

Inside the building, that dynamic created an imbalance. Younger scouts rarely challenged the process, and experienced voices had limited influence.

Part of that structure stemmed from front office changes.

How Gruden used Mark Davis’ weakness to gain power in the Raiders

Davis has had this issue since the beginning that today’s Raiders fan would know all too well. Remember how Davis allowed Tom Brady to bring in John Spytek as his favored general manager? Now, it allows Brady to make decisions that Spytek cannot overtake. Similar was the case back then.

The team replaced GM Reggie McKenzie with Mike Mayock. The latter was picked off from the NFL Network’s TV set and had never been a GM before. He barely had three years of playing experience in the NFL. As such, he wasn’t in a position to counter Gruden’s authority.

“When you see an established coach bring in a GM who’s never done the job, it’s 100 percent because the coach wants to run the building and manipulate things exactly how he likes them,” said a former team employee.

While things look up for the Raiders now, the Gruden-Mayock pairing failed to say the least. Gruden oversaw four drafts in his second stint, with the 2019 and 2020 classes standing out for underperformance.

In 2019, the Raiders held three first-round picks. Initially, they planned to trade back and select Clemson edge Clelin Ferrell later. But despite the internal pushback, Gruden selected him as the fourth overall pick. Talk about a bust!

Ferrell failed to live up to the top-five pick hype and has been bouncing around the league since, playing only one game last season with the San Francisco 49ers.

Similarly, the Raiders selected safety Johnathan Abram with the 27th overall pick in 2019. While he had a solid 2021 season, recording 116 tackles, the Raiders declined his fifth-year option. Abram failed to find long-term stability as a free agent. The pattern was clear: the high draft investments did not translate into core players.

The 2020 draft followed a similar process.

The Raiders needed a defensive back and ultimately picked Damon Arnette in the first round. He had a decent rookie season but slumped in 2021. They waived him in November that year. In 2024, Sports Illustrated’s Hondo Carpenter reported that Gruden influenced the decision to pick Arnette more than Mayock, adding more layers to how the returning head coach failed the team.

“I know of, I’m going to guess close to 10 teams in which Damon Arnette was not even on their board,” Carpenter said. “Mayock was not a big Arnette guy, but Gruden wanted him.”

That said, the Raiders cycled through roster changes while struggling to offset those moves through free agency and the draft. By 2021, the internal strain had escalated to the point where the organization was effectively divided heading into the draft.

The coaching staff and scouts worked separately during Jon Gruden’s Raiders tenure

Jon Gruden had 51 percent power while Mike Mayock operated with 49 percent. However, the balance between the HC and the GM started to break down ahead of the 2021 draft.

Following the past two disappointing draft processes, both sides developed separate draft boards. Gruden and his coaching staff operated independently from Mayock and the scouting department. Of course, the two boards reflected entirely different evaluations.

“By 2021, the building started to splinter. The Raiders were now in a sparkling new facility in Las Vegas, where the coaches worked on one side of the building, the scouts another,” Keefer added. “An old Al Davis maxim designed to prevent them from ‘buddying up,’ one former staffer said. The result was two separate draft boards, one stacked by Gruden and the coaches, the second by Mayock and the scouts. Confusion reigned.”

That lack of alignment translated directly into outcomes.

Mark Davis had brought Gruden on a ten-year, $100 million deal. However, the coach lasted barely four seasons. He led the Raiders to a 22-21 record during his tenure. In that stretch, the franchise finished fourth, third, and second in the AFC West over his first three seasons before he resigned during the 2021 season. The Raiders are still searching for stability under the head coach ever since.

This year, however, feels different. For starters, Tom Brady is now involved as a minority owner, the franchise is evaluating national champion Fernando Mendoza in the draft, and Kirk Cousins was signed to lend his expertise. They moved on from Pete Carroll to bring in Klint Kubiak after his Super Bowl run as a coordinator.

Structurally, the expectations mirror those from 2018. The difference now lies in whether the organization can turn that optimism into wins.