Raiders have high expectations for the return of Jon Gruden
Over the weekend, the Oakland Raiders made it official, Jon Gruden will return to the team as the next head coach. But that wasn’t very surprising. Rumors of his return have been spreading like wild fire for over a week and even Gruden wasn’t denying them. But the details of his supposed contract on the other hand, was rather surprising indeed.
It’s being reported that Gruden will be given a 10 year contract worth $100 million dollars.
That’s a record breaking contract for an NFL head coach, but it’s not the money that’s particularly surprising. We all knew that Gruden would be highly paid no matter who managed to coax him out of the broadcast booth. And at $10 million a year, he wouldn’t even be the highest paid coach in terms of average per year. Bill Belichick reportedly makes $12.5 million per year.
But even Belichick has never received a contract the length of what Gruden is getting. Head coaching contracts are never disclosed in the way that player contracts are but Boston.com did some digging and if their estimates are correct, Belichick signed a five year contract when he joined the Patriots and since then he’s signed extensions between two and six years in length. So while in total, Belichick has received more than ten years, he was never given that many at one time.
Even the man who may be the greatest head coach in the history of the NFL was never given as much long term security as Gruden is about to receive.
That’s where the risk lays in the contract being offered to Gruden. It’s not that the Raiders will be paying him highly. That’s neither surprising nor concerning. It’s that they will be paying him for a decade regardless of whether or not he succeeds. NFL coaching contracts are almost always fully guaranteed which means if Gruden fails to be as successful as the Raiders think he is, they will have a hard time firing him and paying another coach to replace him.
Clearly Mark Davis and the Raiders aren’t too concerned about whether or not Gruden will be successful in his return to Oakland or they wouldn’t have offered such a long and lucrative deal.
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