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When we last saw the Raiders in the postseason, it was Super Bowl XXXVII and Jon Gruden was on the opposite sideline for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, directing a 48-21 victory against the team he had coached the previous season.

Fourteen years later, the Raiders are back in the playoffs and Gruden is in the ESPN broadcast booth as a game analyst, wondering where all the time went.

“It seems like it’s been a while, doesn’t it?” Gruden said this week in a phone interview. “There’s been a lot of change out there with the Raiders. “They’ve hung in there and got themselves in position. It’s too bad Derek Carr isn’t with them.”

Which, of course, is the underlying theme of the Raiders AFC wild-card game Saturday against the Houston Texans. Carr’s absence makes the game have much less of a national appeal, which means nothing to the rosters of two playoff teams.

“First of all, you’ve got to get over it,” Gruden said. “You’ve got to move on. You know, the Texans lost J.J. Watt. A lot of people would have called off the season when J.J. Watt got hurt. But they hung in there. You’ve got to make some serious adjustments.

“It’s too bad it’s this point in the season, but it’s part of the game, and I’m sure Jack Del Rio has stressed that.”

Gruden said the Raiders didn’t do nearly enough to support reserve quarterbacks Matt McGloin and Connor Cook in a 24-6 loss to the Denver Broncos in Week 17. Cook will start Saturday’s playoff game, with McGloin potentially unavailable for backup duty because of a left shoulder injury.

Cook was one of the quarterbacks featured in the annual series “Gruden’s QB Camp.”

“Guys have got to step up and I didn’t see that last week,” Gruden said. “That’s what was disappointing for me. The offensive line didn’t play as good. The defense didn’t play well from the very first play on the screen pass.

“They’ve got to put it to bed, lean on a talented young quarterback and pick it up around him. Everybody’s got to play better.”

Other observations from the former coach who led the Raiders in 2000 to their first playoff berth in six years — to that point the longest the franchise had gone without a postseason game in the Al Davis era:

Cook’s shaky early days of training camp and the difficulty of developing a quarterback under the CBA:

“This collective bargaining agreement makes it impossible for a young quarterback to develop. They don’t get any reps, and when they do get a rep, everybody’s out there watching them with their ink pens and their Twitter sites ready to go.

“These poor guys don’t know the offense, they don’t know the snap count or the how the audible system works. They don’t know any of their teammates, and they damn sure don’t know anything about the defense they’re seeing. So it’s ugly. Around the league, it’s a universal problem. And unfortunately, they don’t want us practicing more than two hours. They don’t want us working with these players in the offseason.

“At least it sounds like Cook has had a chance to get a full week of reps, and they can try to avoid things he doesn’t understand. The problem is he’s going against (defensive coordinator) Romeo Crennel, and right now they’re doing as much on defense as any team in the league.”

The advantages of Cook having played in a pro-style system at Michigan State:

“He’s a lot further along than the guys I meet. I watched Ohio State against Clemson. I don’t even know if they have a forward pass right now. Some of these guys are in no-huddle offenses. They’ve never called a play. They have a silent snap count. They’ve never audibled on their own.

“They have to look to the sideline for their information, and it’s a problem when you get in the NFL and the coach says, ‘Hey, audible to this, check this running play to a three-technique, use a dummy snap to decipher the defense and then use some dummy hand signals.’ And the guy looks at you cross-eyed.”

What was learned from the game in Mexico City:

“Houston can’t give Oakland any cheap plays. They blew a couple of coverages. (Jamize) Olawale had a 75-yard touchdown pass, to a fullback. They threw a one-yard flat route to Amari Cooper and he ran for a 35-yard touchdown. They threw a 2-yard pass to (Latavius) Murray and he ran for 40 yards.

“Houston’s got to be saying, ‘Are we kidding ourselves? We gave that game away.’ ” They can’t let the Oakland running backs mismatch their linebackers.”