| |  A silver lining for all
By Mark Kreidler
Special to ESPN.com
Jon Gruden has two teams among the four still in the Super Bowl hunt: the one he's coaching this season and the one he coached last. In pointy-head football circles, this fact might be employed in any number of ways.
It could be used to suggest, for example, that Gruden incomprehensibly ditched a Super Bowl-caliber team in the Oakland Raiders, who simply ran up against a Tuck Rule they couldn't overpower in last year's playoffs in New England.
|  | | Malcolm Glazer was all smiles despite coughing up $8 million and four draft picks to make Jon Gruden the Bucs' new coach. |
It could suggest that Gruden was a smart enough young fellow to get himself to Tampa Bay in time to board the victory train there, understanding as he did that the Bucs were a few offensive tweaks away from making a serious run toward San Diego.
It could suggest that the Glazers, who somehow plucked Gruden out of the absolute chaos that was their coaching search, are the luckiest owners on the face of the earth. It could suggest that Al Davis knew his Raiders precisely well enough to understand he could part with Gruden and still put a winner on the field.
Lots of freaking suggestions, now that we mention it. Instead, let's go with the one that actually works: This was the elusive "win-win" you're always hearing so much about, and so seldom actually seeing.
If Gruden attaches any sentiment to the presence of the Raiders in the AFC championship against Tennessee, he does a dandy job of keeping it bottled. During last week's walk-up to Tampa Bay's 31-6 demolition of San Francisco, Gruden was peppered with questions from California reporters about his Oakland days. Aside from the very occasional bristle, he remained firmly in the present.
"They'd throw me in the bay around here if I focused on (the past)," Gruden said at one point. "This is a very exciting time around here ... I'm gonna be a real shallow guy in terms of how I look at the world right now."
He's got no motivation to do otherwise. Gruden has taken essentially the same Tampa Bay team that finished 9-7 last season and made the first-round playoff exit that got Tony Dungy fired -- taken the same team, that is, to a 13-4 record and a rematch in Philadelphia, this time for the NFC title.
He made the right move. Gruden couldn't live with Davis anymore in Oakland, and vice versa. The coach sensed, quite correctly, that Davis didn't take kindly to Gruden's occasional wandering eye (both Ohio State and Notre Dame were said to have contacted him during the 2001 campaign), as though a 38-year-old successful coach were not going to exploit the opportunities around him. Tampa Bay offered a five-year contract worth $17 million. Opportunity exploited.*
Having said that, Al Davis made the right move as well. Davis understood that he and Gruden were either near the end of their time together or close enough to spit on it, and he spit first. The Raiders owner actually had one of his best 24-hour stretches in recent memory: From facing the possibility of Steve Mariucci taking the Tampa job, Gruden coaching out a lame-duck 2002 season and then Gruden going to San Francisco, Davis maneuvered his franchise to this end instead: Gruden to Tampa Bay in exchange for $8 million, two first-round draft choices and two second-rounders. You could say he did all right.
And the Glazers? Already publicly rejected by Bill "I'll Never Coach Again" Parcells, the family at one point appeared dead-headed toward a resolutely embarrassing finish: They would have cast off the popular and respected Dungy and gotten nothing of note in return.
A year later, you can't argue with much of anything concerning Tampa Bay, least of all the Glazers' ultimate acquisition of Jon Gruden to lead the team. It's no guarantee of success in Philadelphia, where the last two Bucs postseasons have come to inglorious ends; but even veterans like defensive lineman Warren Sapp, an unabashed admirer of Dungy, sense a different set of possibilities this weekend.
"He's made our offense accountable for every snap they've taken," Sapp said. "He's also spread some joy and love and fun around. We have fun around here, and that's one thing about this team that's different from any of the other teams I've been on. There's a bounce about us. Just the way we move through the drills, there's a bounce."
The Raiders had that bounce under the hyper-intense Gruden -- but, if anything, their continued success under comparatively benign Bill Callahan suggests there is more than one way to motivate the exact same players. Gruden, come to think of it, seems to be proving the same thing with Dungy's former roster in Tampa Bay.
That much, of course, isn't breaking news. This much may be: The Raiders and Bucs and Grudens and Davises and Glazers all mixed it up pretty good about a year ago, and as of this minute it's just about impossible to say anybody got the worst of the action. That's a compliment all around -- and if that happened every day, they wouldn't be writing stories about it.
Mark Kreidler is a columnist with the Sacramento Bee and a regular contributor to ESPN.com
|
|
|
Conference Championship
