After trading Khalil Mack, what’s next for the Raiders?

Khalil Mack is a rare talent, one that Jon Gruden didn’t think he needed on his team — so now what?

When you think about Labor Day Weekend sales, it’s usually BOGO deals on shirts or price cuts on dishware. Never, at least not normally, do you get an All-Pro future Hall of Fame defensive player on sale. That’s what the Chicago Bears got on Saturday, and while the optics of paying a guy over $100 million doesn’t seem like deal, it’s the best steal of the weekend.

Not for the Oakland Raiders, however.

While everyone is waxing poetic, perhaps too soon, about how the Bears are going to be playoff contenders this year, there’s a Khalil Mack sized crater in Oakland that we need to address.

It’s unconscionable that this happened, full stop. Finding players as good as Mack, an All-Pro on track to be a future Hall of Famer who is just now entering his prime, is hard. Players like him are not next to impossible to find but never become available. Once you have a guy like Mack you hang onto him until the day his jersey is raised into the rafters, you don’t trade him to shake things up.

Mack isn’t getting moved because he has legal troubles or because he’s cancer in the locker room. In fact, Mack is a pillar of the Oakland community and

is

was the face of the Raiders franchise. Now there’s a void left in his place, one that Jon Gruden is going to fill one way or another.

This is Chucky’s team now. Gruden is the singular identity of the Raiders franchise. He has pushed all of his chips to the center, callously (and perhaps unknowingly?) tossing his Super Bowl ring onto the top of the pile. The deal oozes with bravado, as Gruden’s legacy will be defined by this. Either he wins another Super Bowl and laughs at the media for thinking they know better than him, or it all blow up in his face forever tarnishing his legacy.

There are no half measures.

The trade happened, so we need to get over the idea that there was no price high enough to pry Mack away. All we’re left with is what he was actually dealt for, and what the Raiders can do with it. Oakland now has a pair of first-round picks to build a foundation for the future with, and have been spared the $100 million-plus needed to keep Mack in town. The defense was already a mess even with Mack anchoring it, so that’s a natural starting point. Guys like Nick Bosa, Ed Oliver, and Devin White seem like fits to take the mantle of being the face of Gruden’s defense. There are also offensive options, and there’s always the possibility that the Raiders could package their now-four first round picks in any combination to move up and get a franchise player.

It’s hard to get excited about any of those outcomes, though. Anything and everything that could happen is clouded by the fact that the Bears are going to be good next year, potentially outside of the Top-10 of the draft order good. There’s no guarantee that the draft picks Oakland received will be top selections, and that’s before we begin to break down whether Gruden will even make the right pick.

Which end of this generation’s Hershel Walker trade will Gruden end up on, and is it possible for there to be a win-win for both sides?

We haven’t seen what Gruden’s team will look like in action, which is the linchpin to our criticisms. Judgment can’t truly be passed until we see if this mad experiment will work or not. Every decision has been extremely curious, from the Mack trade to assembling a team best suited to win ten years ago. Our collective eyebrows are raised as high as they can go, and now it’s up to Gruden to either prove us wrong or validate every suspicion we all have about this being a very long decade for Raiders fans.