The Raiders have reportedly re-hired Tom Cable as the team’s offensive line coach, and while normally the hiring of an offensive line coach would not make waves, this one deserves serious scrutiny.
Not because of Cable and the Raiders’ history — I’m not getting into that — but because of the work Cable has done since being fired as the Raiders’ head coach at the end of the 2010 season.
This hire should concern Raiders fans.
It makes all the sense in the world that Jon Gruden, the Raiders’ new head coach, would hire Cable as his offensive line coach. He has a strong Raiders history, he’s a big name, and he can install a zone blocking scheme for Gruden’s West Coast Offense.
And that last point is the one Raiders fans should worry about.
Cable is one of the leading proponents of zone blocking, and the Seahawks found tremendous success but also extreme failure with it in Cable’s seven-year run as Seattle’s offensive line coach.
Much of that had to do with personnel — Cable inherited a solid offensive line in his early years in Seattle and it (and some solid zone blocking) was able to help the Seahawks go to two Super Bowls. But the Seahawks organization opted to stop spending on offensive linemen in recent years, and the Seahawks’ offensive line play dramatically suffered.
It’s not fair to say that Cable isn’t a strong tactician because of Seattle’s terrible offensive line play over the last two years — he didn’t have much to work with, if we’re being honest.
Despite the dramatic change in talent, Cable didn’t change his scheme — the Seahawks ran zone. That’s his system.
And the Raiders’ offensive line personnel isn’t built for Cable’s brand of zone.
Is Gruden trying to fit a square pegs into a round holes?
This was a concern when Gruden was hired. Gruden is a longtime proponent of zone blocking (as most all West Coast Offense disciples are) but I gave the Raiders’ new coach the benefit of the doubt when he said that he would take a look at the Raiders’ personnel and build a system around the team’s strengths.
You can run a West Coast-style offense without zone blocking being the primary offensive line scheme — it’s typically called Pro Style.
And Gruden’s WCO contemporary, Andy Reid, has modified his West Coast Offense to become more of a smash-mouth spread attack — a la Urban Meyer at Ohio State — in Kansas City. That scheme has offensive linemen pulling and driving all over the place — a joy to watch.
Gruden, who has sat in a Tampa strip mall for the last nine years, watching film cut-ups, no doubt is noticed what his buddy Reid was doing in Kansas City. When he then took a look at the Raiders’ roster, which boasts the best-paid offensive line in football and arguably the best interior offensive line in the AFC, a light bulb should have gone off in his mind.
Perhaps it has.
But hiring Cable makes me seriously question if there’s illumination.
The Raiders’ offensive line is a bad outside zone blocking team. It really is as simple as that. They can’t do it. They’re not built for it.
But last year, in an effort to assimilate Marshawn Lynch (former Seattle Seahawk) into the offense, offensive coordinator Todd Downing installed a ton of outside zone blocking plays, a la Cable. The Raiders’ offensive line had run zone before — they were (and probably still are) particularly adept at inside zone, which is a straightforward blocking scheme that many can confuse for power/man-to-man — but never at the clip Downing was requesting.
For a while, it worked. Then it all fell apart. You can probably pinpoint the downfall by looking at the schedule.
The Raiders moved away from outside zone and eventually went back to being a predominantly power blocking team late in the season, but the damage had been done.
The mixing and matching of blocking schemes — typically based on which running back was in the game — proved to be a massive component of Downing and Jack Del Rio’s exits. The outside zone blocking, in particular, did both in.
Lessons need to be learned from that failure, no matter who the head coach is now.
The Raiders offensive line is built for power — they are old-school, and that means they want to push up the field, not press laterally (as is asked in a zone).
If Cable wants to install the pure zone-blocking scheme he championed in Seattle — predicated by outside zone — the Raiders either need to change their offensive line personnel or expect more bad results in the 2018 season.
Now, there are compromises that can be made without coming across as half-measures — Cable has shown the ability to add man-to-man wrinkles to basic zone plays in the past. That might work, though I’m skeptical. (The Seahawks’ playoff win over the Lions last year had so many wrinkles that there were more than a few people who thought that Cable had switched to a power scheme for the game. He didn’t.) The easiest compromise: the Raiders have thrived with pull-and-pin blocking, which mixes zone and power concepts. Cable could re-install that — it was a big part of the Raiders’ 2016 offensive success — and see big benefits. (In pin-and-pull, the ends press inside while a guard pulls around and seal the outside.)
But we don’t know what Cable will do. We can only judge off off his and Gruden’s track records — and both have pushed pure zone blocking as a near unimpeachable ideology. Now they’re taking over a build-for-power team that struggled mightily with zone blocking last year.
What could go wrong?
