Captain Fear
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- Mar 20, 2019
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Two weeks ago, the NFL huffed and puffed and ultimately didn’t blow the Tennessee Titans’ house down. With the Raiders potentially derailing their Week Seven game and possibly sparking what would be the eighteenth week of the 2020 season, the NFL should blow the Raiders’ house down.
For all the tough training-camp talk from coach Jon Gruden regarding the importance of beating COVID-19, the Raiders repeatedly have had their asses kicked when it comes to protocol compliance, from Gruden failing to properly wear a mask on multiple occasions (in Week Three at New England he was sporting what best can be described as a loin cloth over his mouth) to allowing an unauthorized person into their locker room to the ridiculously stupid decision of multiple players to attend a mask-free indoor event that violated local regulations to the latest news, as reported by the league’s in-house media operation (i.e., by the league itself) that offensive lineman Trent Brown wasn’t wearing his contact tracing device and the team’s offensive linemen gathered without masks.
Although the league (wisely) opted to show flexibility and understanding with the Titans given that plenty of teams were struggling to achieve full COVID-19 protocol compliance, the Raiders at this point have had fair warning. It’s time to make an example out of someone in order to ensure that everyone does what they’re supposed to do.
And when it comes to placing blame, look no farther than Gruden himself. He’s the knock-on-wood-if-you’re-with-me head coach who should have been hammering into all players any and all messages necessary to get everyone to do everything they should be doing. He knows how to harangue when it comes to anything and everything football related. Either he wasn’t doing that with COVID-19 issues, or he wasn’t doing it well enough.
So, yes, the time for patience has ended and the time for punishment has come. For Gruden, of course, it may be punishment enough to have to face his former team for the first time without a full roster of his best players. That said, and to borrow on Cam Newton‘s recent turn of phrase, Gruden should be pointing thumbs not fingers when trying to figure out why it is that his squad is being steamrolled by the Buccaneers on Sunday after or Monday night or Tuesday night or whenever this game is played.