Not Feeling Super About Gruden

The Oakland Raiders are indisputably, unmistakably focused entirely on Sunday’s AFC championship game against the Tennessee Titans.

However ... Jon Gruden and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers could be lurking just beyond the horizon.

“That would sell more tickets,” said Oakland guard Frank Middleton, who briefly indulged a reporter Thursday in a game of “what if?” even after saying, “We don’t talk about Gruden in this locker room.”

To reach the Super Bowl, the Raiders have to topple Tennessee, which has won 11 of its last 12 games, and the Buccaneers need to win in Philadelphia, where they are 0-3 against the Eagles since 2000 and have been outscored, 72-22.

But a championship game pitting the Raiders and Buccaneers might be the fiercest blood feud in Super Bowl history.

You know the story. Gruden coached the Raiders for four seasons, building them into a playoff team before making a quick exit for the Buccaneers last spring. Many of his players, fiercely loyal to him before, felt betrayed and abandoned. Even though the Raiders got a gaudy payout for trading away the final year of his contract -- four high draft picks and $8 million in cash -- a bitterness lingers.

“A lot of the antics that happened when Gruden was here, and how they had to have a camera fixated on him during a game, to me was funny,” said tackle Lincoln Kennedy without cracking a hint of a smile. “He was like a little man who wanted to be a big man and wanted to rule the world. He had kind of a Napoleonic complex. It’s things like that that Gruden carried himself the way he carried himself.”

Kennedy said he has far more respect for Bill Callahan, Gruden’s replacement.

“He’s consistent in how he handles himself,” Kennedy said. “To me, that’s respectable. He hasn’t changed from the time he was an offensive line coach to the time he’s a head coach. His demeanor is still the same, from the way he approaches offensive line, to the way he approaches receivers, running backs, whoever. His demeanor is still the same way.

“And when he talks to the media, I’ve heard him in press conferences, he’s still the same way. He doesn’t change it up. He doesn’t necessarily have a game-day face that he puts on here for the cameras and then goes in and does something different.”

Gruden has been mostly mum on the Raiders, but he opened up recently to Ann Killion, a sports columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. She confronted him with some of the rumors that have reverberated through the hallways at Raider headquarters since his departure.

On the notion the Raiders lost the last three games of the 2001 season because he created so much tension in the locker room, Gruden said: “I’m sorry about that tension, boys. Maybe if we made a couple of field goals, that our kicker was good enough to make, maybe I wouldn’t have been so tense. I a-pol-o-giiize.”

And what about the whispers Jerry Porter never got the chance to flourish under Gruden?

“Maybe Jerry Porter wasn’t ready to be an every-down player,” he said. “Maybe 10 years from now Jerry Porter will say it was a beneficial time in his career.”

Or this little bit of revisionist history: That Al Davis, not Gruden, was the man behind bringing in Rich Gannon and Jerry Rice.

“That’s exactly right,” Gruden said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I didn’t want any of those guys.”

There’s no disputing the fact the Raider players love Callahan, who led them to an AFC West title in his first season despite an 0-4 slide.

“Obviously being a rookie coach it’s hard to stay poised,” tight end Roland Williams said. “Being 4-0, then being 0-4 and everybody’s starting to doubt you. He stayed the course. Obviously we’ve seen some success because of it.

“When we were going through that 0-4 stint, he let us know we weren’t paying attention to detail. And that we weren’t being how we wanted to be. He’s the kind of person who at practice when it’s not going good, he’ll reset and make us do it again. You never want to hear that when you’re a player: ‘Let’s start over! Let’s take it from the top!’ But he does that.”

Middleton said the circus surrounding Gruden seeped into the locker room.

“It was kind of hard to concentrate on football last year,” he said. “Every week somebody had a different story about Gruden. ‘He’s going here. He’s going there.’ He’s trying to downplay it a little bit. It kind of made it hard. But this year we’ve had no distractions. We have a coach that’s going to be here and wants to be here.”

And the Raiders want to be in San Diego. If Gruden is there, it’s all the better.