Mike Mayock will continue to play the good soldier, but only because that is what he's paid to do.
But you have to wonder what he's thinking now that he knows _ without equivocation _ that he is effectively powerless with the Raiders.
Sure, Jon Gruden will let Mayock, the ex-NFL Network draft guru, make some picks in April, and he'll let him give press conferences where he pushes a narrative of "culture" and "accountability. But he's not really the team's general manager. He's a glorified spokesperson for the Raiders' player-personnel department.
Now that the dust has settled on the latest _ but certainly not last _ incident in the Antonio Brown Saga, with the star wide receiver only needing to apologize for threatening to punch Mayock in the face, that much is evident.
It feeds into a larger lesson from this whole fiasco, best expressed by one of Gruden's favorite bands, AC/DC:
"Listen to the money talk."
By letting Brown return to the team Friday in an effort to have him on the field for the Raiders' Monday Night Football season opener, Gruden flashed his cash and publicly re-established the power structure in Alameda and his organization's true values.
He sent two clear messages. Neither is encouraging.
The first lesson: Gruden is the ringleader of this circus and don't you ever forget it. He calls the shots and answers to one person _ owner Mark Davis _ who is so punchdrunk in love with Gruden that he's a rubber stamp.
And Brown? Well, that's Gruden's guy, at least more so than Mayock.
Why is he going to bat for Brown? Well, because Brown is really, really good at football.
Oh, he's also an offensive player. Gruden's favoritism for that side of the ball is long chronicled and consistently reinforced. Just juxtapose how Gruden handled the Khalil Mack holdout compared to Brown's. Had Mack been an elite tight end and not a defensive end, he'd still be a Raider.
In keeping Brown, Gruden has told us all that he's about winning right now. Back-to-back losing seasons means Gruden will probably have to head to Las Vegas with a new _ likely young _ quarterback at the helm. I imagine that's something Gruden would like to avoid at all costs.
The Raiders are going to have a terrible defense in 2019. It might be worse than last year's outfit, which was historically bad. So the only way Gruden's team is going to be relevant this year is if they have one of the best offenses in the NFL.
And the only way that the Raiders are going to reach that level is if Brown _ the best player on the Oakland roster by a wide margin _ is on the field.
That brings us to the second lesson from Friday's decision:
Gruden _ "culture" and team-wide message be damned _ confirmed what Brown has suspected all along: normal rules do not actually apply to him; he's too good.
"If they wanna play, they going to play by my rules," Brown told ESPN before his trade to the Raiders.
The Raiders are following his edict. Brown can do whatever he wants, apparently so long as he catches 125 passes this year.
I bet he gets that number (and as we know with Brown, numbers are important to him), but can you imagine a circumstance where this doesn't backfire in the process?
You give Brown an inch and he takes a yard, both on the field and off it. Now Gruden has effectively given him a pass for a transgression that would have gotten everyone but perhaps Tom Brady cut from their team.
What's next?
Oh, and we haven't even started the season yet. You think Brown will hesitate to share his true feelings on quarterback Derek Carr if he's not getting the ball frequently enough?
This whole situation is a tinderbox. The Raiders didn't change this past offseason. _ gotten smarter, more efficient, more professional. No, they doubled-down on chaos.
I don't know if Al Davis would love this for recoil. But I do know that the Raiders will live by his words this season: Just win, baby.
If Gruden, Brown, and the Raiders don't beat the Broncos on Monday, this decision to play the wide receiver will look even more ridiculous than it already is.
I won't even entertain the notion of what happens if the Raiders don't make a push for the playoffs. There's going to be so much nonsense between now and then, it would be malpractice to speculate on how it all goes down.
So where does this hot mess leave Mayock? In no-man's land, just like Gruden's last GM, Reggie McKenzie.
Thursday, the national NFL writers _ nearly to a man _ reported that the Raiders were considering suspending Brown for his actions at practice Wednesday. Do you think that's some conspiracy? Some coincidence? No, that was the word coming out of the offices of Raiders headquarters while Gruden was on the practice field. That's how a normal, competent team would respond to the situations.
But not the Raiders.
In all, Mayock did his job and tried to enforce common-sense discipline on an out-of-pocket and then out-of-line player.
For that, Brown threatened to punch him. And then Mayock's boss, Gruden, knocked him down a peg or two.
The whole situation seems quite emasculating, and Mayock doesn't strike me as someone who takes kindly to that.
No, now Mayock's job, if he sticks around, is to follow a pyromaniac and put out fires _ all while Gruden turns a blind eye.
