When Jon Gruden was with the Raiders in his second go-round as the team’s head coach, he wanted things done his way. When it came to the NFL Draft, he had his own ideas about players and he did not necessarily want to go along with the opinions of his team’s scouts.
According to an article in The Athletic about Gruden’s coaching and leadership techniques while he was working as head coach from 2018 through 2021, Gruden used to dismiss scouting reports about players he was not interested in drafting. It didn’t matter if the team’s scouts did extensive reports and research about a player and they came up with a favorable impression. If Gruden didn’t like the player, he had “kill tapes” made so the organization would not draft him.
He did this by having videotapes edited to make a player look bad. He would have all of the players’ errors or poor plays edited together so the Raiders’ scouting department’s conclusions about a player would be dismissed.
“It wasn’t reflective of all the work you did,” said one team source who anonymously spoke to Zak Keefer of The Athletic to provide information about the Raiders organization for the purpose of the story. “You can make a player look any way you want. You can make Tom Brady look like a bum.”
When the tape was viewed by the organization, younger and less experienced scouts did not fight back. Older and more experienced scouts would continue to defend the prospects, but Gruden’s opinion and determination were too powerful to overcome.
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