This isn't how how Jon Gruden imagined his return to the NFL would go. The Raiders began the season with three straight losses, finally got a win against the Browns, and are currently on a five-game losing streak, the last coming Sunday afternoon against the Chargers. How bad has it been?

In those five loses the Raiders have scored 10, 3, 28, 3 and 6 points.

So who's to blame for taking this franchise from one of the best in the league two seasons ago, when it finished 12-4, and refashioning it into one of the worst?

"I always look in the mirror, and the buck stops with me," owner Mark Davis told ESPN.com's Paul Gutierrez after Sunday's 20-6 home loss to the Chargers. "Where this team is right now is my fault. We haven't been able to build a 22-man roster. We haven't been able to give this team a chance to win because the reconstruction failed. We failed from 2014 on to have a roster right now."

Davis is referring to the four-year plan to turn the organization around. Starting in 2012, the thinking went, the team should be able to land five players -- three in the draft and two in free agency -- every year to rebuild the roster. Several of those cornerstones have been shipped out of town; Khalil Mack was traded before the season and the Raiders' pass rush immediately suffered. Amari Cooper was traded several weeks ago and Derek Carr and the offense continue to sputter.

But the Raiders genuinely wanted to keep Mack, Davis said. The problem was that they couldn't afford to pay him what he wanted.

"Jon [Gruden] wanted him," the owner explained. "Everybody thinks that Jon's the one who wanted to get rid of him. Jon wanted him badly. Why wouldn't you want this guy? [General manager] Reggie [McKenzie] wanted him badly. And I wanted him badly, too. But, if in fact we were going to give the type of money that we were going to give to him, and we had Derek [Carr] on that type of a (contract), how were we going to go ahead and build this football team, with all the holes that we had?"

And the reshaping of this team continues. Bruce Irvin, the Raiders highest-paid defender, was released earlier this month and there has been speculation that Carr could be the next to go, possibly in the offseason, as Gruden looks to remake this team in his image.

"Derek's taking a lot of s--- right now," Davis said bluntly. "He is the franchise quarterback right now. He doesn't have Amari Cooper. He lost [Martavis] Bryant to a knee injury today. Guys have been getting hurt. Who's he throwing to? Jordy Nelson and Seth Roberts, which are good guys. But they're not putting the fear of God in anybody. The tight end [Jared Cook] is playing his ass off. You look at the quarterback and he's playing behind a battered offensive line ... so I don't know what you can put on Derek and I don't think it's fair to put all the blame on him."

Which brings us back to Gruden. He's the coach. He's the man Davis is paying $100 million, and so far all he has to show for it is one win, eight losses and a lot of upheaval.

"We are just going to keep working hard and practicing, preparing as hard as we can and keep developing the players that are here," Gruden said after Sunday's loss, via MercuryNews.com's Matt Schneidman. "Hopefully it translates into wins. We have a lot to play for. We have seven weeks to spend with these players. Some of these guys are getting better and better and the future is something we will talk about later. Right now it is hard to lose but we are seeing progress in our young players. Some of these veterans are giving us what they have and I am proud of them."

But not everyone shares Gruden's glass-half-full view of the situation. Schneidman writes that "... one Raiders veteran walked past three reporters as he left the locker room and said to another veteran, 'I gotta get the (expletive) outta here,' before exiting the double doors to the bowels of the Coliseum."

Maybe the player was talking in specifics, as in: "I gotta get out of here and get home before my wife kills me. See ya tomorrow." Then again, it's also entirely possible that the player was talking in more general terms. As in: "I gotta get out of here because this place is coming apart at the seams."

The good news is that the Raiders have three first-round picks and can fix a lof of their issues in the offseason. The bad news is there are seven games left in the 2018 season.