What exactly are the Oakland Raiders doing?

No division looks harder to decipher than the AFC West. Each franchise appears set to deploy a higher-variance operation compared to last season.  

The two-time reigning champion Chiefs ditched their high-floor quarterback for a talented wild card, but Patrick Mahomes likely won’t be a sure thing in 2018. The Chargers possess the division's most balance, but their injury problems and astonishing place in the NFL fandom lexicon (perhaps no NFL team since the advent of television has carried a smaller fan base than the current Bolts) could bizarrely limit them. Denver is banking on a journeyman passer to revive its division-kingpin status.

Then, the Raiders: perhaps the league’s most difficult team to read. At a point when the division doesn’t have a clear front-runner, the Raiders pivoted in a radical direction that has their trajectory difficult to determine.

While Oakland’s previous setup spent last season squandering plenty of the goodwill built up over the previous two years, bringing back the third-most successful coach in franchise history is not the success certainty the 10-year contract suggests.

General manager Reggie McKenzie now has less power, and it showed this offseason. After years of a steady rebuild, and some turbulence in 2017, the Raiders gave Jon Gruden the keys. He's driven the vehicle in a different direction.

Aging cogs now flood the roster. The Raiders signed 11 players who are either north of 30 or will be by season's end. By far the most such signings in the league, Oakland's number is more than the rest of the AFC West combined and more than three other entire divisions. The Silver and Black, which employed some rather famous older players the last time Gruden was in charge, have a good chance of carrying between 15 and 19 veterans the new coach signed this year — approximately a third of the team. 

Unlike many of McKenzie’s past free agency buys, these newcomers don’t look like long-term investments. However, it's arguable the Raiders needed a new direction.

McKenzie bizarrely allocated most of his 2017 free agency funding to offensive upgrades, leaving a perpetually shaky defense alone. With Oakland’s first- and second-round defenders (Gareon Conley and Obi Melifonwu) playing a combined seven games, McKenzie’s top rookies contributed strikingly little to the cause. The Raiders ended the year 29th in defensive DVOA.

But previously, McKenzie's Raiders showed legitimate progress — to the point that high-level free agents finally agreed to take the franchise’s money. Oakland's offensive line mercenaries (Donald Penn, Kelechi Osemele, Rodney Hudson) and seminal 2014 draft class (Khalil Mack, Derek Carr, Gabe Jackson) still represent the Raiders’ core. But Gruden supplemented it with a stream of one-year deals, mid-level commodities with low ceilings (see: Oakland’s new-look linebackers and secondary) and, as evidenced by the Martavis Bryant/Arden Key/Maurice Hurst draft-weekend acquisitions, viewed no risk as too great.

Gruden explained his affinity for these veterans, viewing them as willing mentors for the younger players. Hurst and Key have the new coaching staff giddy; these picks working out would bring vital depth to a pass rush that’s lacked a reliable interior presence throughout Mack’s tenure.

This cavalcade of moves, though, is a lot to process at once. To say the least, this was an atypical player-procurement period. Of the 16 free agents the Raiders signed in the spring, just two of them (Rashaan Melvin and fullback Keith Smith) are fifth-year players, the customary free agent age. Everyone else is older.

How much does all of it even matter if this Mack saga continues?

Non-“Monday Night Football” analyst Gruden still hasn’t met Mack, and the predominant reporting doesn't indicate the Raiders have made him an offer. This sequence seems strange and won't endear Mack to the Raiders long term. 

Carr and Jackson signed their landmark contracts five months after becoming extension-eligible. Because of the team-friendly, fifth-year option, Mack, who didn't hold out like Aaron Donald did last summer, had to wait (and risk a career-altering injury in 2017) while inferior Raiders draftees cashed in.

If the Raiders haven’t gotten serious about a deal with their best player since a prime Charles Woodson, with Mack being the kind of talent the team for years couldn’t acquire, this sends a bad message.

Rumblings of Mark Davis not having the financial wherewithal to authorize a Von Miller-level guarantee (in the $70 million range and likely more since the cap’s risen by $22M since the Denver dynamo's extension) have surfaced. If true, that would be a rather bad look for a team that accepted a record $750M in public stadium funding. 

Trading Mack would be a locker-room catastrophe and a PR disaster for a team that’s achieved so little over the past 15 years. But somehow, we’re at the point that it's in play, even if the Raiders still hold the leverage over their disgruntled star.

Davis’ Gruden coup does not offer much security that the Raiders can re-establish themselves as a Super Bowl threat — something that seemed close to imminent before last season's 6-10 disaster. Gruden guided the Buccaneers to a dominant Super Bowl conquest, but stripped of a world-conquering defense and a Rich Gannon-caliber quarterback, his 1.0 coaching career ended meekly. Now 55, Gruden re-enters a much different NFL.

Were the Raiders too harsh in abandoning their previous arrangement? They were on the precipice of the AFC’s No. 2 seed two seasons ago before Carr's leg break. Is it possible Carr’s subsequent back injury accelerated the offense’s regression last season? Of course, other than the core 2014 trio, along with Amari Cooper and Latavius Murray, McKenzie’s drafts have yet to produce additional upper-echelon contributors.

This Raiders nucleus, however, no longer looks like the rising force it recently did — bad timing in a division that has three other teams facing big-picture questions. And if Mack's traded, the AFC West will not be a four-team race this season. 

That'd be a pretty sharp turn from this franchise's outlook the last time Carr was fully healthy and would put the lame duck Raiders on the verge of positioning themselves for a more prosperous Las Vegas future rather than aiming for a memorable Oakland goodbye.

While it can’t be certain Gruden’s once-transformative presence won’t revive the Raiders immediately, the events of the past several months should induce caution regarding how promising this new path will be.