Jon Gruden Is Reportedly Showing His Players Grainy Game Film From The Mid-70's, In Case You Were Concerned His Comeback Wasn't Going To Go Exactly As Expected

Raiders TE Jared Cook was born in 1987. Jon Gruden is showing team football film that is older, he said. “He’s bringing out film from like 1976 when you ain’t even think they had film. Grainy film where you can barely see the players.” Added some of plays, scheme originate there.

— Michael Gehlken (@GehlkenNFL) July 31, 2018

For what it's worth, Jon Gruden has definitely silenced some critics since signing a decade long deal that will apparently last him until approximately two decades after his coaching tactics reached their expiration date. I think he would have preferred doing so by way of actually winning, but the jabs are just objectively less fun to throw with the target of them living out the laughs while they are still on the tip of twitter's collective tongue. What beating everyone to the punchline by becoming a professional parody of Bear Bryant lacks in both sense and potential success, it more than makes up for in self-deprecating humor...even if it's unintentional. The Raiders' redux might not currently get the joke, but - in seeming as though he's bringing Gruden's Grinders to a stadium near you - he's well on his way to making it on behalf of every football fan that spit out their coffee when the details of his ludicrous contract scrolled across their screen. 

I don't want to call one of the most franchise imprisoning experiments in professional sports a failure without first analyzing a single result, but the initial look into it coming in less than standard definition from a VCR isn't exactly a hot start. As is the case with most sequels, I was already skeptical of the second installment of the Jon Gruden Era, and through opening credits that might as well be in black and white it has yet to change my mind.

Using football footage from 1976 as a teaching tool for your NFL team in the year 2018 is less useful than making the rugby rulebook required reading, because it probably has more in common with a sport that's become nearly unrecognizable since the turn of the century, never mind 24 years prior. Add that to the fact that Jon Grudenhates instant replay, apparently thinks that the authoritarianism of the silent treatment is still the best way to block stud pass rushers from securing their bag, and values old-school tactics over talent and...VOILA!...you have the recipe for a mentality that became outdated well before dates were a thing you had to pay attention to in order to catch TV shows when they came out...

Report: Khalil Mack, Jon Gruden 'have not spoken once'https://t.co/vmy4VXDK6M pic.twitter.com/SDqF4svvf4

— Raiders on NBCS (@NBCSRaiders) July 26, 2018

It's still wayyyy to early to jump to any conclusions and I don't think he's going to completely phone in his (unlikely to be fulfilled) ten year tenure. However, in dialing up the distant past in designing for the future he's metaphorically calling the shots from a cup on a string as the rest of the football world is communicating by way of much smarter devices. That's a bad sign for the Oak-Vegas Raiders organization, even if it could make for one of the greatest self-fulfilling prophecies in sports' history.