SARASOTA, Fla. — As someone who always monitors the tone of his team’s fan base, and yes, he keeps up on social media, Raiders general manager Dave Ziegler not only appreciates Raider Nation’s frustration over a season that hasn’t yet met expectations, he completely shares it.

And just as the Raiders 2-5 start under the first-year leadership of Ziegler and Josh McDaniels eats at the fans, it eats at him too.

“The frustration of the fan base is totally warranted,” Ziegler said on Wednesday from the Raiders’ Florida practice base. “And I can appreciate their passion. And for me and for Josh and the organization, there’s nothing more that we want than to win football games and to see this fan base get what they deserve, which is a consistent winner.”

But at the same time — and with all due respect to a fan base that has endured more than two decades of mostly bad football — the Raiders’ first-year general manager isn’t going to let a seven-game snippet deter him from continuing to honor the long-range plan in place to set up a franchise that has produced just two winning seasons over the past 20 years for long-term success.

“We were hired to change the culture and develop the culture here,” Ziegler said. “We were also hired to build a football team that could sustain and win.”

No matter how frustrating the short-term results might be at the moment, Ziegler will stay true to the process he and McDaniels are putting in place. That includes simultaneously trying to compete for a playoff spot this year while also doing a top-to-bottom assessment of the football operation.

“We’re seven games into a new regime, a new organization, a new way of doing things,” Ziegler said. “For us, it hasn’t gone as quick as we would have liked it to go, but we’re not wavering from our approach. We’re going to stick with our plan, improve it as we go along, and we’re confident the results will come.”

That includes resisting the urge to swing a deal at the deadline on Tuesday that may have offered some short-term benefits but would have come at the expense of assets Ziegler considers vital for the future. Ziegler said the Raiders spoke to all 31 teams during the deadline process, but in spite of “tons of talks,” he opted against jeopardizing the long range for the short range.

“You can make mistakes when you get overaggressive and you’re just doing something to do something,” Ziegler said. “At the end of the day, the value didn’t fit for us and nothing worked out.”

Contact Vincent Bonsignore at [email protected]. Follow @VinnyBonsignore on Twitter.