Make California Post a Preferred Source For all the time we spend talking about who needs a ring, who deserves a ring, and whose perfectly fine career will forever be held against him because he never won a ring, you’d think a guy who finally got his hands on one would wear the thing to the grocery store.
Andrew Janocko has worn his two times. And only at the urging of his better half.
“I wore it this summer twice at the request of my wife,” the Raiders’ offensive coordinator said Thursday.
The rest of the time, the Super Bowl ring Janocko earned as the Seahawks’ quarterbacks coach stays tucked away in a safe deposit box. Which tells you something about how little time the NFL gives coaches to enjoy the very thing they spend their professional lives chasing.
Consider Janocko’s boss. On a special Sunday in February, Klint Kubiak called the plays that helped Seattle beat New England for the Super Bowl championsip. The very next day, the Raiders were announcing him as their head coach.
Many of us have had weekends off that lasted far longer than Kubiak got to be the reigning Super Bowl champion offensive coordinator of the Seattle Seahawks.
Kubiak wasted little time bringing two of his Super Bowl lieutenants with him to the desert. He tapped Janocko, who coached Sam Darnold in Seattle, to run the Raiders’ offense and Rick Dennison, who coordinated the Seahawks’ run game, to coach the offensive line.
Fernando Mendoza’s first NFL start will command most of the attention at Allegiant Stadium, and rightfully so. But consider what the afternoon asks of three men on the Raiders’ sideline. They spent last season figuring out how to get a special group of Seahawks to the Super Bowl. They’ve spent this week trying to make sure their former colleagues have a miserable flight home.
“It’s a big one because it’s the next one,” Janocko said of Sunday’s game.
Give him credit. That might be the only way to make facing the team you won a championship with sound like a Thursday night in Cleveland.
Kubiak had a pretty good reason for holding off on the nostalgia himself. When the subject came up early in the week, he still had a 38–17 loss to the 49ers to sort through. There were five Raiders turnovers on that film. The trip down memory lane could wait until after the walkthrough.
“And I’ll turn the page here later this afternoon,” he said.
Ask Kubiak what he brought with him from Seattle, though, and he’ll give you something to chew on. Tom Brady and the Raiders saw what he did with Darnold and wanted him to develop the quarterback they would select first overall. Kubiak, for his part, was paying attention to how the two men above him, head coach Mike Macdonald and general manager John Schneider, ran a football team.
“Number one, I think it’s just organizationally, just an all-football building, and from John Schneider to Coach Macdonald, just extremely intelligent people that treat people the right way and get the most out of their people because they’re genuinely good people.”
That might be the piece of Seattle Kubiak can put to work fastest. On Sunday, Mendoza will come off the field after his first series as an NFL starter and look for somebody to talk to. He’ll have the head coach who called plays for a Super Bowl winner and the coordinator who sat next to that quarterback between possessions. Whatever the kid just saw, there’s a decent chance one of them has seen it across a practice field.
As for what happens when Janocko sees the people he shared all that with, he’s made room in the schedule.
“We’ll hug and stuff after the game, but we’ll let everyone else deal with that.”
There’ll be time for a handshake, a hug and, if the Raiders can pull this off, maybe a little grief for a few old friends. Anybody hoping to get a look at Janocko’s ring, though, ought to take it up with his wife. So far, she’s the only one who’s gotten him to wear it.
