To twist the old saying a little, you can’t hope to beat the Las Vegas Raiders because they’re so easy to stop. The last person to learn that lesson is their 12-game-old head coach.
Antonio Pierce was touted as the franchise’s latest savior, the coach this historically listless team would respond to after the Josh McDaniels Experience; with Pierce as a role model, the team would vibrate with joyful devotion to the greater cause. So trusting. So naive. But these are the Raiders, who talked about it for two decades but steadfastly refused to act on it, and who are now changing. This is an organization that goes from “Hey, who’s the new guy?” to “Hey, when are we getting a new guy?” with unusual alacrity. It’s why Raiders coaches have averaged 26 games between hiring and firing since their 37th Super Bowl loss in 2002. That’s barely a season and a half.
Pierce is halfway there, but now he knows. Gravity is a nasty bastard.
After watching his team suffer a team-wide DNP-DGAF in a listless 36-22 loss to the incredibly bad Carolina Panthers, Pierce resorted to the last motivational tool of the modern coach: “I’ve already tired most of you out, and my only regret is that I can’t fire you all now.” It’s an inspirational speech designed to get the guys to ditch the bullets and head to the beach.
But we don’t want to paraphrase when we can quote directly: “I think there were definitely some individuals who made business decisions, and we’ll continue to make business decisions in the future,” he said at the Raiders’ traditional postgame Podium Of Shame. “We got our asses kicked. I would have booed us too.”
Oh, did we mention this was the Raiders’ first home game after a briefly impressive win at Baltmore? They came home as absolute winners, hosting a team that had been outscored 73-13 in its first two games and had just traded its supposed franchise quarterback, the first-round pick a year ago, for a fresh-faced redhead, possibly at the behest of the sport’s most pushy and least football-savvy owner. What could possibly go wrong?
We’re going to wait here in the corner until you stop laughing and pointing at us. That’s rude.
The whole thing was it. The details of the game are pretty ordinary – the Raiders allowed 450 yards to the worst team in football, forced no turnovers, and had the ball for barely 24 minutes. Pierce is right that they did get “kicked in the face.” The Raiders do this all the time; they barely win a third of their games, are the second-worst team in sports since losing the Super Bowl, and have allowed nearly 2,000 more points than they’ve scored in that time. In the larger context, “Panthers 36, Raiders 22 in home opener” is exactly what the Raiders are and what they have been for the last four presidents.
But Pierce, a positive motivator and relative newcomer to coaching, hadn’t gotten the unvarnished view of things until Sunday. At the podium, after being trashed by Andy Dalton (and there’s no nice way to say that), it suddenly seemed to dawn on Pierce that the same crippling malaise that defined Raiders football is still Raiders football. He decided that yelling at them in the privacy of the locker room — which itself was a kind of hopeful gesture, since it presupposes that they could actually be shamed.
So Pierce did it, where everyone could see and hear, his deliberate disgust turning him into a menacing metronome. When a softball pitcher with a badge asked him what positives he could take from the game, Pierce replied succinctly, “Nothing.” Even in Dallas, the players care enough about the game to fight each other.
None of the 13 coaches the Raiders have employed over the past 21 years have figured out how to sufficiently embrace/inspire/scare this team; Rich Bisaccia, who inspired a brief moment of competence as interim coach, seems to have surprised them more than anything in retrospect. That Pierce, who had a similar mid-season surge and was by all accounts the locker room’s choice to replace McDaniels, is hitting his first motivational wall three games into his first full season is not a good sign for the future. But what would that be if you assume “actually beating the Panthers” is off the table?
The NFL is a strange place right now, even for its typically twisted atmosphere; almost everything in it has receded to a murky gray mediocrity after just three turns of the wheel. The Chiefs, the defending champions, are undefeated but have won by only seven, one and five points in those victories. The Vikings are – oh, but we’ll leave that to Comrade Magary and his delusions. But even in a season of room-temperature parity, the Raiders are never not the Raiders, which means Pierce’s manifesto will likely be received the same way all the others have – with sideways glances from players and another 85 percent effort.
The team may believe in Pierce as a concept and it seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea at the time, but the Raiders are really just that and will remain so until they prove otherwise. If Pierce waves a handful of layoffs in front of his roster without the actual power to dish them out – and he’s not the general manager, after all – the rest of his season will be painful as usual and the layoff he finds could very well be his own.
After 26 games, like the prototypical Raider coach.
