Las Vegas Raiders: The Rise and Fall of former head coach Jon Gruden
By Alex Perl
Las Vegas Raiders: The Rise and Fall of former head coach Jon Gruden
Gruden lands in Tampa Bay
In his first season in charge, Gruden led the Buccaneers to a Super Bowl victory. To add even further insult to injury, the team he beat was his former in the Raiders. The game ended in a 48-21 drubbing, and many speculated that Gruden reveled at the chance to hit back at Davis for the surprising departure that apparently ‘caught him off guard.”
He would go on to coach the Buccaneers until the 2008 season, in which his magic had seemed like it finally had run out, and the Bucs decided to fire the immensely popular coach. Gruden’s passion for the sport never left even after the sacking, by 2010 he had already ventured back into coaching, albeit in a more meager venue, by becoming a volunteer assistant offensive line coach for a small school in the Tampa area that housed grades two through high school.
The downtime also led to Gruden creating FFCA (Fired Football Coaches Association), which in theory sounded like a joke, but became a hotbed for coaches to visit as Gruden had stored a significant amount of player and game film, and also playbooks in which Gruden had accumulated and would update over the years. Gruden called the facility which was run out of rented office in a Tampa-based area strip mall a “Football Think-Tank”, and the facilities were operated all the way up until 2018.