Oakland Raiders coach Mark Davis sat down with ESPN after the team's loss on Sunday and talked about a variety of topics including the team's horrid start to this season. Davis said he is to blame for the team's 1-8 start, but he doesn't think the struggles are really a result of what is happening with this team now, rather the plan that was started in 2014.
“I always look in the mirror, and the buck stops with me,” Davis said to Paul Gutierrez of ESPN. “Where this team is right now is my fault. We haven't been able to build a 22-man roster. We haven't been able to give this team a chance to win because the reconstruction failed. We failed from 2014 on to have a roster right now.”
In 2012 Davis introduced the new rebuild project that would get them five good players each year to build for the future. Three of those players would come through the draft and the other two through free agency. The Raiders have drafted a couple of good players in Khalil Mack and Amari Cooper but now they have traded them away so maybe the Raiders are going back to that same rebuild project with the draft picks they have acquired from those two trades.
Davis also opened up about the Mack trade and made it clear that Jon Gruden wanted him on the team but giving him that type of money just wasn't possible if they wanted to build up the rest of the team.
“Jon wanted him. Everybody thinks that Jon's the one who wanted to get rid of him. Jon wanted him badly. Why wouldn't you want this guy? Reggie wanted him badly. And I wanted him badly, too. But, if in fact we were going to give the type of money that we were going to give to him, and we had Derek on that type of a (contract), how were we going to go ahead and build this football team, with all the holes that we had?”
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