Following a 10-year absence from the sidelines, Jon Gruden has his first opportunity back in the NFL with the Oakland Raiders. Through his first few months on the job, he has been quite poignant on what he expects from his team and how he will prepare them for the upcoming season.

The Raiders have undergone their day of minicamp this week that has given Gruden the chance to put his touch on what to expect in the practice atmosphere. According to Jerry McDonald of The Mercury News, Pro Bowl quarterback Derek Carr stated that the first day certainly did not feel like just that.

“We went out there and we practiced and it didn’t feel like a Day 1,” Carr said. “We felt like we had been in it. We felt like we had been grinding. We felt like we kind of knew what we were doing, then just making little corrections. It wasn’t like, `Hey, this is brand new.’ It just felt like, `This is what we do.’ ”

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Gruden has already gone to work on getting his team ready to go through an offseason that will plenty of new schematic game planning implemented under the next coaching staff. The fact that it felt like they were several days into the process speaks to the understanding that the players already have of what is expected of them.

Carr also added that Gruden had attempted to throw different looks at him defensively, but he was able to respond well with the right audibles for the situations that could arise over the course of a game. The relationship between these two will be a key part in determining how much success Oakland will have next season.

With them both seemingly hitting it off on the right page at this point, it could help set the tone of what's to come for the rest of the offseason heading into the 2018 campaign.