Raiders’ McKenzie Says Allen Got Rave Reviews Around NFL at BetLM

Raiders’ McKenzie Says Allen Got Rave Reviews Around NFL

ALAMEDA, Calif. — Reg­gie McKen­zie started research­ing Den­nis Allen as a poten­tial coach­ing can­di­date this past sea­son when he first heard the Oak­land Raiders might hire him as a gen­eral manager.

He talked to some of Allen’s for­mer play­ers and coach­ing col­leagues and only got rave reviews. When McKen­zie sat down with Allen two weeks ago in Den­ver for his first inter­view, he knew he had found his man.

“The bot­tom line: He was what the doc­tor ordered,” McKen­zie said Mon­day at a news con­fer­ence to intro­duce Allen. “He under­stood the big pic­ture as far as putting a plan together, how to do this, this and this. We went over every­thing. How you treat peo­ple, how you treat play­ers, get­ting a staff together. It was all right in line (with) the way I was thinking.”

With spec­u­la­tion point­ing to McKen­zie hir­ing one of his for­mer col­leagues in Green Bay to be his first head coach, he instead turned to the 39-year-old Allen, who had just one year of expe­ri­ence as a defen­sive coor­di­na­tor in Den­ver and had never been a head coach at any level.

He starts his first head-coaching job in Oak­land with the task of turn­ing around a fran­chise that has gone nine straight sea­sons with­out a win­ning record or a play­off berth while going through a revolv­ing door of head coaches. Allen is the sev­enth head coach for the Raiders since Jon Gru­den left in 2002, but he is the first to be hired since long­time owner Al Davis died in October.

Davis’ son, Mark, took over as man­ag­ing gen­eral part­ner and hired McKen­zie ear­lier this month to remake the foot­ball side of the orga­ni­za­tion. McKen­zie imme­di­ately fired Hue Jack­son, who went 8–8 in his only sea­son as head coach, and then began the search that ended with Allen’s hiring.

Allen got more sta­bil­ity than his pre­de­ces­sors with a four-year con­tract as opposed to the two guar­an­teed years they were given under Al Davis and will have more say in putting together his staff and ros­ter than head coaches pre­vi­ously had in Oakland.

“At the end of the day, what I was really con­cerned with was, who are the peo­ple that are lead­ing the orga­ni­za­tion now? The peo­ple who are lead­ing the orga­ni­za­tion now are Mark Davis and Reg­gie McKen­zie, and when I looked across the table at Reg­gie McKen­zie, I knew that was a man that I believed in and that I trusted in,” Allen said. “That was the only thing that was a con­cern to me, and that was what really drew me to this job.”

Allen has plenty of work to do to turn the Raiders around after a nearly decade-long stretch of los­ing and poor play. Oak­land has been plagued by sloppy play and porous run defense dur­ing that stretch and both issues were major prob­lems last season.

Oak­land also set an NFL record last sea­son with 163 penal­ties for 1,358 yards so it came as lit­tle sur­prise that Allen used a ver­sion of the word dis­ci­pline more than a half-dozen times in his news conference.

“The only way that you cre­ate habits is through con­sis­tency, doing the same things over and over and over,” Allen said. “Well, if you’re com­mit­ting penal­ties, that becomes a habit. We’ve got to change those habits, all right? We’ve got to develop the proper habits so that we’re not cre­at­ing those penal­ties on a daily basis.”

The Raiders are also com­ing off one of their worst defen­sive sea­sons ever. Oak­land had fran­chise worsts in touch­down passes allowed (31), yards per carry (5.1), yards pass­ing (4,262) and total yards (6,201), while giv­ing up the third-most points (433) in team history.

The strug­gles came despite a unit that had high-priced and high-profile play­ers through­out, from line­men Richard Sey­mour and Tommy Kelly to line­back­ers Rolando McClain and Kame­rion Wim­b­ley and defen­sive backs Stan­ford Routt and Michael Huff.

“I don’t think rad­i­cal changes are what need to be made,” Allen said. “Obvi­ously, just with all aspects of the game, you’re always going to try to upgrade your team in what­ever way that you can, but I do still feel like there’s a tal­ented defense. I feel like we got enough play­ers, both on offense and defense, that we can win a cham­pi­onship with.”

Allen and McKen­zie will make those tweaks together as McKen­zie envi­sions a gen­eral manager-coach rela­tion­ship sim­i­lar to the suc­cess­ful ones he wit­nessed as an exec­u­tive in Green Bay.

“This is a team effort,” McKen­zie said. “When we go about get­ting play­ers, work on get­ting a staff in here, how we’re going to do things on the foot­ball side, we’re going to do these things together. It’s not, ‘I got this, you have this.’ We’re not doing it like that. The right hand will know what the left hand is doing. We’re in this thing together.”

Allen said he will not call defen­sive plays as head coach, pre­fer­ring to be a “game man­ager” who is deeply involved in all facets of the team on game days. That will put a greater impor­tance on the staff he puts together.

Copy­right 2012

BetLM's sports betting news features unique sports betting articles as well as current sports news compiled from leading wire services. This arti­cle was dis­trib­uted by Syn­di­cated Sports news wire and aggre­ga­tion ser­vice, For more NFL news see: Raiders’ McKen­zie says Allen got rave reviews around NFL.

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