Seattle Seahawks @ Oakland Raiders preview: Veteran coaches target London pride

Sunday’s first of three NFL matches to be played at Wembley this month pits together two of the sport’s veteran head coaches with a combined age of 122 - Pete Carroll of the Seattle Seahawks and Jon Gruden, at the start of his second stint with the Oakland Raiders.

Both have won a Super Bowl, yet their two sides will not exactly stroll into Wembley this week, arriving with more of a limp having combined for three wins and seven losses so far this year.

The fascination around Gruden’s return to the NFL after a decade away is a multi-layered one, but it starts with a relatively straightforward question: can he still win?

Gruden, now 55, is back coaching in the NFL after a decade away from the sideline, spent as the main analyst on ESPN’s Monday Night Football.

Back in January his return was confirmed: Gruden the head coach was back and with the Oakland Raiders, the team he coached between 1998 to 2001 before being traded in a blockbuster move to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Gruden, an offense coach by trade, won a Super Bowl in his first year with the Bucs, squeezing the best out of a mid-range quarterback while riding on a fierce Buccaneers defence, as Tampa Bay thrashed his old side the Raiders 48-21 in Super Bowl XXXVII.

Gruden stayed with the Bucs for another six seasons, making the play-offs only twice and losing in the first round on both occasions, resulting in his dismissal at the start of 2009.

Here is a detail about Gruden which is essential to know before going any further: his coaching style is ferocious. During his time with the Raiders he was bestowed with the nickname ‘Chucky’, after the maniacal doll with whom Gruden shares an unfortunate resemblance. 

Tirades were frequent. ‘Double days’ (two training sessions as opposed to the regulatory one) were common and loathed by his players. Gruden fed off confrontation and when the Raiders were making the AFC Championship Game - effectively the semi-finals - and the Bucs won the Super Bowl, no one was complaining. As time wore on in Florida however the cracks began to appear.

Back in January, the Raiders appointed Gruden as head coach for the second time, on a bombastic 10-year, $100 million contract. ‘Chucky’ is being paid like no other head coach in NFL history to fire up the Raiders, who leave Oakland next year to move to Las Vegas, and to win a first Super Bowl since 1983. 

It has hardly been an encouraging start. The NFL has moved on drastically in its use of technology and data analysis since Gruden last held on to a clipboard a decade ago, and yet during training camp back in August he stressed that his approach would be “old-school”, which for Gruden consists of 5am tape reviews in his dimly-lit office searching for solutions from any date ranging from last week back to the 1990s.

Of greater concern was the fact that Gruden signed off on trading a league-leading defensive talent in Khalil Mack to the Chicago Bears in exchange for two first-round picks, a move which was teed up to be mocked a few weeks into the season when Gruden then complained about having a lack of players on his roster capable of rushing the quarterback. Mack meanwhile has since played at an MVP level and harassed quarterbacks in every game since joining the Bears, registering five sackes and four forced fumbles.

As for Carroll, while the Raiders are attempting to build a dynasty, the Seahawks are trying to put an end to the mourning over the death of their own dominant era.

Seattle reached back-to-back Super Bowls in 2012 and 2013 thanks to an elusive quarterback in Russell Wilson, the bulldozer running of now-Raider Marshawn Lynch and a quite phenomenal defence built Michael Bennett, Bobby Wagner, Cliff Avril but most of all the ‘Legion of Boom’, the Seahawks’ secondary who thrived off turnovers featuring Richard Sherman, Kam Chancellor and Earl Thomas.

Now the Legion are no more, with Sherman at the 49ers and Chancellor retired, the mood being summed up by a contract dispute between the team and Thomas which raged all summer and culminated with the safety flipping the bird towards his own bench after fracturing his leg two weeks ago.

Carroll’s mission with Seattle on his arrival in 2010, unearthing overlooked talents in the draft and subsequently building a juggernaut, has quite rightly earned him widespread praise. He is now 67 but you would never know it, given the way he marches up and down the sideline constantly animated, clenched fists punching the air.

However the Seahawks over the last two seasons have unravelled, effectively closing their ‘Super Bowl window’ and dredging back up memories of Carroll’s incredulous decision to pass, rather than run the ball with Lynch in the form of his life, with Seattle on the one-yard line and in position to win Super Bowl XLIX against the New England Patriots. Malcolm Butler pounced for the most dramatic of interceptions and Carroll’s record with the Seahawks was consigned to one Super Bowl won, and one incredulously lost. 

Gruden and Carroll therefore arrive in London this week with very different objectives. While Gruden seeks to recapture the glory days of old, Carroll is bidding to ensure his legacy in Seattle is not remembered for losing a Super Bowl with his team half a yard from the end zone.