Examining Oakland Raiders’ Offseason and Key Preseason Positional Battles

And so it goes for the Oakland Raiders: another long season; another strange offseason; another chance to look ahead to the future of the franchise.

It’s been quite a while since we could look at the Raiders without some sense of bewilderment. Once one of professional football’s most successful organizations, Oakland has fallen to the NFL wayside, an island of misfits looking for direction at every level.

And so it goes.

Yet things aren’t always as bad as they seem. Sure, 10 straight non-winning seasons don’t look all that promising for the future of the franchise, especially after a 4-12 record a year ago. Sometimes, though, it takes a complete overhaul to rebuild a foundation, and the Raiders appear to have settled on making the necessary changes at the most important levels.

Call me crazy, but seeing Dennis Allen still at the helm for a second season is one of those necessary changes.

In the last 20 years since Art Shell’s first tenure with the team (six seasons), the Raiders' head coaching position has been a revolving door of discontinuity and unrest, perpetuated by 10 coaching changes and a lot of uncertainty. For NFL franchises to find sustained success, coaching stability has to be at the top of the priority list.

Allen’s return means at least another year for the former defensive coordinator to get his pieces in place. It may seem like an outdated NFL stereotype, but it holds some truth: Building under a new head coach takes more than one season.

The same also holds true for the general manager position.

It’s no secret the late Al Davis has more than one hand in the player personnel aspects of the franchise, and by the end of his time in Oakland, the Raiders had become the laughing stock of the NFL where free agency and the draft were concerned. He was a bright football mind in his earlier years, but his approach to team ...

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