Oakland Raiders: Reggie McKenzie’s Youth Movement

Taking a closer look at Reggie McKenzie and the youth movement of the Oakland Raiders.

Reggie McKenzie was hired to be the General Manager of the Oakland Raiders on January 5, 2012 — less than three months after the passing Al Davis.

He was recommended for the job by former Davis advisors John Madden and Ron Wolf, and was hired shortly after a joint interview that was conducted by Madden and Mark Davis.

McKenzie inherited a roster that was filled with overpaid veterans and underperforming players. Oakland was a mess — the team was more than $34M over the salary cap, and also was short on draft picks. Not exactly a winning combination.

And so began the groundwork on what was surely going to be a lengthy rebuilding process.

McKenzie got right to work, first by firing the Head Coach who was the temporary GM in Hue Jackson, who traded away those draft picks. Next, he began to release overpaid players such as Kamerion Wimbley, Stanford Routt, and Chris Johnson.

The vision at the time was simple; to get out of salary cap hell. But at the same time, McKenzie always kept a big picture goal in mind — build a younger football team.

It may not have seemed like it in the early days of McKenzie’s tenure, but it’s abundantly clear now that McKenzie’s goal has to been to build a young, talented roster.

The reason why that may be hard to believe is because the moves in the early days speak to the contrary, with the signings of free agents such as Maurice Jones-Drew, James Jones, and LaMarr Woodley, just to name a few.

But remember, hardly anyone was willing to sign in Oakland at the time. McKenzie chased after plenty of bigger names, but they all passed for one reason or another. Whether it was because they weren’t interested playing with a roster devoid of talent, or they weren’t a fan of the coaching staff, or maybe because of the uncertainty with the stadium situation.

So McKenzie was often forced to settle for signing veterans past their prime. But to his credit, every veteran player was always signed to a team-friendly deal — maintaining plenty of cap space and roster flexibility, while McKenzie focused on building the team through the draft.

Several successful drafts improved the roster, which in turn made Oakland a more attractive destination for prospective free agents. This included drafting players like Derek Carr, Khalil Mack, Gabe Jackson, Amari Cooper, and Mario Edwards Jr, who all have become important players for the franchise.

Having that type of foundation in place goes a long way in making the team more appealing to potential free agents. Gone are the days of the marquee free agent signings being players already mentioned — MJD, Jones, Woodley — or the likes of Keith Boothe, Tracy Porter, or Mike Jenkins, among others.

Instead, McKenzie was able to land a haul of top-tier free agents that included Kelechi Osemele (26), Sean Smith (28), and Bruce Irvin (28). Players that are both young, and extremely talented.

All of the losing seasons have made this feel like a long time coming, including the rough start to McKenzie’s tenure (from a win-loss standpoint), but looking at the roster as of May of 2016, McKenzie’s vision to build a young, talented football team has come to fruition. The process, as McKenzie has often preached, is starting to pay off.

Only five players on Oakland’s roster are 30 or older. Five. That’s it. Sebastian Janikowski, Donald Penn, Reggie Nelson, Marcel Reece, and Jon Condo.

Nelson (32) was a signee from this most recent free-agent class, but the younger safeties were taken off the market with expensive price tags, and Nelson is on a very team-friendly deal.

Penn was a free agent addition to replace Jared Veldheer, and he’s been a revelation at left tackle. His best days may be behind him, but he’s been an outstanding member of this football team the last few seasons.

The other three players — Janikowski, Reece, Condo — were already on the roster when McKenzie took over.

It’s crazy to think about that — only five players on the roster above 30 years old, and only two of them were added to the roster by McKenzie himself.

Taking things one step further; only one player on the entire roster is 29 years old, and that’s Austin Howard. And he just turned 29 in March, so the Raiders won’t even have a sixth player who is 30 years old during the season, unless they add one to the roster at some point.

I mean this in the most complimentary way possible — McKenzie is building the Raiders like many of us probably built our Madden franchises. Basically any player 30 order older gets the boot, with few exceptions.

The craziest thing about this might be how quickly it happened. In September of 2014, the Raiders had the oldest team in the entire league, when measured by average age of the players on the roster.

As recently as September of 2015, Oakland had the 10th oldest roster in the NFL. So there was some improvement year over year, but the team was still in the top-third of age rankings.

I put together my best quick-list of 53 players to make the final roster for the upcoming season, and the average age of the group was 25.8, which based on last year’s numbers, would rank them as the 4th youngest team in the league.

So not only has McKenzie managed to build a football team that is much younger, but he built a team that is much more competitive as well. So to get the team as young as they are, as competitive as they are, as fast as it happened, is truly remarkable.

In a season or two, the roster has a chance to be the youngest in the NFL. The five players that are currently 30 or older may not be on the roster for much longer. Janikowski could retire, and Nelson, Reece, Condo, and Penn all could be on the way out after one or two seasons.

Just to see what the future might look like, I replaced each of the five players 30 or older with an age of a player that is 22, and I made everyone else on the active roster one year older. This gave the group an average age of 24.8, which would be the youngest roster in the league.

Looking over how talented the roster is, and then going in-depth to look at how young the roster is, it’s easy to see that something special is brewing in Oakland.

Young. Talented. Dangerous. That’s the current state of the Raiders, and we’re just getting started.