The Las Vegas Raiders had one of the most dramatic seasons in the NFL last season. Prior to the firing of Head Coach Josh McDaniels, there were reports that he was lighting into players and coaches for a variety of bizarre reasons including mockery of the New England Patriots. Luckily for Las Vegas, the team made a dramatic turnaround once McDaniels was replaced with linebackers coach Antonio Pierce. Strangely for Las Vegas, this has happened to the franchise before in the past few seasons.
Raiders Recent Mistake May Repeat Itself
In 2018, the Oakland Raiders hired legendary coach John Gruden to a monster contract and he struggled to pick up any traction. After his incredibly insensitive emails during his tenure as coach of the Washington Redskins, Gruden was fired and replaced with Rich Bisaccia. After starting the season 3-5 under Gruden, Bisaccia performed well and lead the team to a 10-7 record and a playoff berth.
Fast forward to the 2022 offseason: rather than promoting Bisaccia to a full time head coaching position, they went out and acquired McDaniels as the attractive option to improve the team. As a reminder, McDaniels was already a head coach with the Denver Broncos and was a complete disaster. Well sure enough, this season McDaniels team was a train wreck after he brought in quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo to replace long time incumbent Derek Carr.
In a similar fashion, Pierce performed well finishing Las Vegas with a 8-9 record after the team started 3-5 under McDaniels. Even after benching Garoppolo for a relatively unknown rookie quarterback by the name of Aiden O’Connell, Pierce managed to bring a cohesive strength to the team as they were able to defeat the Kansas City Chiefs late in the season.
The team needs to learn from its mistakes and hire the option that has worked for them this season. While Pierce may not have as proven of a track record as some of the other coaches available in this offseason, he would extrapolate to a playoff team with the given roster which some other coaches may time some time to acclimate to. Pierce also has the ability to choose his own coaching staff after being left with interim coaches for most of the season.
The right decision seems fairly obvious for Las Vegas but this team doesn’t always make the best decisions. While I believe that Pierce is the right coach for this team, I would expect Las Vegas to bring in someone like Bengals offensive coordinator Brian Callahan to try to generate an explosive offense in the offseason.
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