Jon Gruden recalls how serious about winning Raiders' Al Davis was, in only a way he can
Al Davis didn't play around when it comes to the Las Vegas Raiders, or the Oakland Raiders, then for that matter, and winning football games. You think there are some bad coaches now that are obsessed with the process? You should have seen Al Davis. And chances are that if you're reading this as a […]
Al Davis didn't play around when it comes to the Las Vegas Raiders, or the Oakland Raiders, then for that matter, and winning football games. You think there are some bad coaches now that are obsessed with the process? You should have seen Al Davis.
And chances are that if you're reading this as a Raiders fan, you have already seen Al Davis. And, he wasn't really a coach, well, he was at one point, but this was the owner of the Raiders, and the guy that really kept things in check, as hard as that was. Al Davis was what made the Raiders successful.
And they had a lot of success. Back between the 1960s and the 1980s, there really wasn't a team more successful. Then you add in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the Raiders were nearly unstoppable then, too, that is, until they went up against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the Super Bowl.
Al Davis was serious about winning, so much so, Jon Gruden, the head coach back when the Raiders were last successful, and even the head coach from a few regimes ago, was scared for his life after he allowed a rival team to do something that shouldn't have happened.
“We cannot let these great pass rushers start feeling it, because when they feel it, one because one more, two becomes… when we played against the Kansas City Chiefs, Derrick Thomas got our quarterback six times. I thought Al Davis was going to throw me out of the f****** airplane," Gruden said to Will Howard during one of his pre-draft QB shows.
Al Davis was serious about winning. And, this is a story that only Gruden could tell in this way because he lived it, and shared so many moments with Davis. Al Davis was the Raiders
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