While discussing his first week of on-field work in his second run as Raiders head coach, Jon Gruden said that this week’s voluntary three-day minicamp would not be “anything but teaching.”
The first practice of minicamp is in the books and quarterback Derek Carr made it sound like there was a bit more than just simple instruction going on during the session. Carr said Gruden “threw everything at me” during Tuesday’s practice and the result was that it felt far different from the first step in the journey.
“We went out there and we practiced and it didn’t feel like a Day One,” Carr said, via the East Bay Times. “We felt like we had been in it. We felt like we had been grinding. We felt like we kind of knew what we were doing, then just making little corrections. It wasn’t like, ‘Hey, this is brand new.’ It just felt like, ‘This is what we do.’”
One thing that may have helped Carr is the presence of offensive coordinator Greg Olson, who was in the same job during Carr’s first year with the Raiders in 2014. That helped speed up Carr’s learning curve this offseason and Gruden said the quarterback “didn’t blink” when faced with the things being thrown his way. The longer that’s the case, the better the chances of Carr and the Raiders bouncing back from a disappointing 2017 season.
