Reggie McKenzie finally gets what Raiders followers knew was coming to him

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Jon Gruden felt so joyous after Sunday’s improbable win over the Pittsburgh Steelers that he finished what had been expected for months and fired general manager Reggie McKenzie.
 
Now he might not have done it himself; it might have Mark Davis, but let’s be honest, this was preordained months ago, and it was done at Gruden’s behest. The teardown has thus been accelerated by at least three weeks, and there will be more.
 
Don’t forget, after all, that it took two full years for the 2012 teardown to be completed, all the way down to updating the computer systems, and that one didn’t even involve a second city.
 
But barely 24 hours after Jason LaCanfora of CBSSports.com reported that it would be done, it was, with three weeks left in the regular season, a time when general managers haven’t got many college games to sift through or pro games left to make evaluations. If there is a downtime for the job, this would be it.

[RELATED: Raiders win over Steelers only a feel-good moment]
 
But Gruden wouldn’t have been deterred even if he got the bug to do it during a game. His tenure has been one move after another to frantically and aggressively clear the decks to remake the Raiders in his image.
 
Wonder how he will look in a jaunty eyepatch.
 
To recount the day when McKenzie was marked for a cardboard box isn’t really useful. The speculation on that literally began the day Gruden’s hiring was first asserted as fact, and there has not been a day since that it wasn’t assumed as a sure thing. Gruden didn’t get the T-Rex contract without acting T-Rexy. The Khalil Mack deal was merely confirmation of what we knew in January.
 
But Gruden wouldn’t have gotten the contract if Mark Davis wasn’t willing to have it happen. The team has been no better since he became the owner than it was in the past decade of his father’s life, and he has fixated on Gruden for even longer than both those eras. And when you want Gruden, you get Gruden the way he wants to present it to you.
 
McKenzie had some successes but even more failures -- but his main shortcoming was being the guy who had the job when Gruden was hired. Gruden had a perfectly fine gig at ESPN anointing quarterback after quarterback without repercussion, so when he came back, he was going to get all the levers of power.
 
And to be fair, it wasn’t like he is tearing down anything other than the West Coast version of the Cincinnati Bengals or Cleveland Browns or New York Jets. The Raiders have been that bad for that long.
 
The only weird thing here is the timing, which became weirder when LaCanfora was apparently looped in on the dropping hammer. His report seemed oddly timed and stating the obvious when in fact it was the flag being raised by someone in the know that the preparation for this week’s reunion with Hue Jackson in Cincinnati would be delayed by a few minutes.
 
The result, though, was the same, with December 10 replacing December 31 as the last day of Reggie McKenzie’s time in Oakland. One could say that Gruden is now on the clock for the entire franchise, but the fact is he’s been on the clock since the day he was hired. This is just one more anticlimax in another anticlimactic season, and 'The Man In A Hurry' has simply removed one more action item from his whiteboard.
 

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