Sin City Raiders

Every offseason, fans and beat reporters alike consider the needs of the team. Who to target in free agency? Who to target in the draft? For the Las Vegas Raiders, what they need is something they can’t simply sign, draft or trade for.

Antonio Pierce earned the title of full-time head coach after rallying the Raiders to a surprising 5-4 record in the final nine games of the 2023 season. It is a title that owner Mark Davis has appointed to seven different men since he took over the franchise in 2011.

Looking back to 2011, things were looking up for the Silver and Black. After enduring years of instability, the Raiders went 8-8 in 2010 and “weren’t losers anymore” in the words of Tom Cable, who wouldn’t be kept around for the next season.

In that next season, Hue Jackson had the Raiders playing their best football since their Super Bowl appearance eight years earlier. Darren McFadden looked like an MVP candidate and Jason Campbell looked like the long-searched-for answer at quarterback. The sense of newfound stability would be short lived. By the end of the season, Al Davis had passed away, Campbell had a season-ending injury which prompted trading their first and second round picks for Carson Palmer and although the Raiders were 7-4 at one point, they finished 8-8 and missed the playoffs by one game; ceding the AFC West to the Tim Tebow-led Denver Broncos.

With Al gone, the team would be controlled by Mark Davis and the search for stability continued.

Mark said all the right things. He admitted that there were things he didn’t know and he consulted with legends like Jon Madden and Ron Wolf in his first ever search for a general manager. Mark hired Reggie McKenzie and the next coach would be Dennis Allen.

The new era of Raider football quickly began to feel like the old one. In all fairness to McKenzie and Allen, they had to wait until the third-round to make their first draft pick. They also inherited a team that was far over the salary cap. And although back to back 8-8 years felt like fresh air for the Raiders after that ungodly stretch from 2003-2009, the 2011 Raiders weren’t Super Bowl contenders. You could wonder what if Hue Jackson was given another year to build the team his way, but that we will never know.

By the end of the 2014 season, there would be changes. During the draft that year, McKenzie earned the right to keep his job with the selections of Khalil Mack, Derek Carr and Gabe Jackson. Dennis Allen would be let go four games into the season and Tony Sparano took over. Although Sparano didn’t rally this team the way that we have seen other interim coaches do, the 0-10 Raiders won their first game of the year on a rainy Thursday night over the Chiefs. Then two weeks later the Raiders upset the 49ers, a victory that earned the appreciation of Raider Nation.

However, it was time to move on after that 3-13 season.

Mark Davis and Reggie McKenzie would bring in Jack Del Rio. Being born and raised in the East Bay, JDR would embrace the Raiders culture. In his first year, Del Rio’s Raiders went 7-9, improving four games over the previous season. The Raiders weren’t “back” just yet, but were on their way.

As the 2016 season went on, the franchise looked like it had found stability. JDR earned the nickname “Blackjack” in his famous decision to go for the win instead of playing for overtime in New Orleans. The Raiders succeeded on the two-point conversion and won the game. It was the first of many victories for the 2016 Raiders. The biggest would come in San Diego during Week 15. Raider Nation did what they regularly do; pack the Chargers stadium and make it an honorary home game. It was here where the Silver and Black clinched their first trip to the playoffs in 13 years.

Much like in 2011, that sense of stability would be short-lived. Derek Carr was injured on Christmas Eve against the Colts and although they had built enough of a lead to hang on to win and improve to a 12-3 record, you could feel the soul being sucked out of the Oakland Coliseum. On top of losing Carr for the season, backup Matt McGloin was injured the next week and the Raiders went into the playoffs with rookie Connor Cook making his first ever start.

Moving into the next year, the Raiders had their sights set on returning to the playoffs with a healthy Carr at quarterback and the 2017 season was off to a strong 2-0 start, marked by the famous video of Marshawn Lynch dancing on the Raider sideline. With Lynch being an Oakland native and with Mark Davis looking for a long-term home, “Beast Mode” suited up for his hometown team while they were still in Oakland.

The 2-0 Raiders went to play in Washington on Sunday night. On that Sunday night in D.C., the Raiders lost more than a game. They lost their identity, and yes their stability. After being pummeled by Washington, rumors came out afterwards that the roster was politically divided and these divisions were highlighted on their trip to Washington D.C. during the Donald Trump presidency and with the attention that had earlier been given to the National Anthem kneeling movement.

No matter the reason, the Raiders were struggling, but they still controlled their own destiny. They were 6-6, but would lose their final four games. This stretch included a prime time game against the Dallas Cowboys where an index card was used for a first-down measurement and a poorly written rule was discovered by many football fans that a fumble that goes through the end-zone is ruled a touchback. These two controversies hit the Raiders in the final five minutes of the game.

Although questionable officiating went against the Raiders in that game, it was clear this team was not the same. All the work Del Rio did to build the Raiders up in 2015 and 2016 had faded away. The 2017 Raiders went 6-10 and it was, again, time for change.

Mark Davis couldn’t help but be giddy about his next move. Seemingly ignoring Reggie McKenzie and the NFL’s Rooney Rule, Davis brought back Jon Gruden and gave him a historic $100 million contract. The size of the contract gave Gruden stability, but his time with the Raiders would be anything but stable.

Building a roster can take time, and 2018 would be a rebuilding year. Before the season began, they traded Khalil Mack to the Bears and during the season, Amari Cooper was sent to the Cowboys. Two players who had helped the Raiders end their 13 year playoff drought just two years earlier were being traded for draft picks. To no surprise, the Raiders finished the season 4-12.

With two of Reggie McKenzie’s best draft picks being dealt, the writing was on the wall for McKenzie to be let go and replaced by Mike Mayock, a new hire who Gruden had a say in choosing.

To Gruden’s credit, he was aggressive in looking to build a winning team. For a third-round pick, he acquired Antonio Brown. Although he would end up being more unstable than the years of Raider football covered in this article, it was a low-cost, high-reward trade. Obviously, it was a disaster as he never played a down for the Raiders, and the fans said good riddance to him with “F**k A.B.” chants in the opening game.

Gruden’s 2019 squad showed promise. At one point, they were 6-4 and rookie Josh Jacobs had the look of a running back who could be the center of a ground-and-pound offense. And although A.B. never played a game, the Raiders passing attack had a new star with the breakout of Darren Waller who caught 90 passes for over 1,000 yards. However, the Raiders went 1-5 over the last six games to finish 7-9. Despite the ugly finish, they made a three-game improvement from 2018 and they had a core they could build around.

2020 was a rough year for the world, and the Raiders were no exception. Their two first-round picks were Henry Ruggs and Damon Arnette, who are no longer in the NFL. Even still, the Raiders had enough talent to start the season strong and were 6-3 before losing by four to the Chiefs. The 6-4 2020 Raiders met the same fate as the 6-4 2019 Raiders where a trip to the East Coast against a struggling team would be their undoing.

In 2019, they were dismantled by the Jets in a 34-3 blowout that the Raiders never recovered from. Then a year later, it was a trip to Atlanta where the Raiders lost 43-6 in a loss that sent them spiraling from playoff-contender to an 8-8 finish.

2021 would be the fourth and final year for Gruden with the Raiders. An investigation into the Washington Football Team unveiled controversial emails from Gruden during his time with ESPN where he used slurs when talking about others in the football world. The discovery of the emails led to Gruden’s abrupt resignation and he left with the team at 3-2.

With the Raiders now being led by interim coach Rich Bisaccia, they would go on an improbable run and although it wasn’t “stability” it was sure fun to watch as the Silver and Black won their final four games to make the playoffs for the first time since Jack Del Rio’s squad in 2016.

Playing in Cincinnati, the Raiders went down to the wire against the Bengals, who would eventually win the AFC. The game ended with a Derek Carr interception in the red zone. However, any Raider fan will tell you the game was tainted earlier when a referee whistled a play dead. Although the whistle blew, the play continued and led to a Bengals touchdown. For a franchise that has endured debatable calls all the way back to “The Immaculate Deception” as George Atkinson calls it, this game joins the list of being screwed over by the league.

But moving on from the insanity of the 2021 season, Mark Davis had a decision to make. He could either retain the interim coach who had led the Raiders through a turbulent season marked by Gruden’s emails and the tragic Henry Ruggs car crash, or Davis could chose to enter a new era.

Davis was widely praised for his decision to hire Josh McDaniels and Dave Ziegler from New England. After all, McDaniels had engineered great offenses for many years with the Patriots. It seemed that finally, even more than hiring Del Rio or Gruden, that the Raiders really had found stability.

McDaniels looked at the roster and felt he could compete with them. He and Ziegler gave contract extensions to Darren Waller and Hunter Renfrow and they used their first and second round picks in a trade to acquire Davante Adams, reuniting him with Carr from their college days together.

By the time the 2022 season was over, the good feelings of the McDaniels hire were long gone. Franchise quarterback Derek Carr left the team after a Christmas Eve loss in Pittsburgh as McDaniels made the decision to bench Carr for the final two games. The recently extended Waller and Renfrow struggled to stay healthy and even when they were, they seemed to have fallen out of favor with McDaniels and Ziegler.

Just a year after making the playoffs, the 2022 Raiders went 6-11 and there were more questions than answers going forward.

The second offseason under McDaniels and Ziegler was much different than the first. Carr was released and the Silver and Black would have a new quarterback for the first time since Carr was drafted in 2014. Also, just one year after extending Darren Waller, he was traded to the Giants.

The new-look Raiders went into 2023 with Jimmy Garopollo at quarterback, while paying him $72 million over three years. For McDaniels, it was a reunion with a quarterback he had worked with in New England.

Before the Raiders even began the season, they released one of the biggest names McDaniels had brought in. Chandler Jones ridiculed the team among other things in a number of social media post and after he violated a restraining order, he was released. As time would tell, he was not the only Raider unhappy with how things were in the desert.

Midway through the season, the Raiders were 3-5 and after a now-famous team meeting where McDaniels opened the floor to players to voice concerns and frustrations, a decision was eventually made by Mark Davis to clean house and fire both the coach and general manager on Halloween night.

Enter another interim coach for the franchise. Antonio Pierce answered the call and rallied his team similar to how Bisaccia had in 2021, he embraced the Raider culture like Del Rio had in 2015 and, like Davis in 2011, Pierce admits there are things he doesn’t know and he has brought in veteran coaches Marvin Lewis and Joe Philbin as assistants.

Finally, this brings us to where the Raiders stand today.

Raider Nation has gotten a taste of what it is like having Pierce as a coach, and they love it. Although there were some bad losses during A.P.’s nine games, things like a victory on Christmas at Kansas City, being a coach who yells “RAAAAIIIIIIDERRRRS” like a fan walking into The Black Hole, having a true love of the history of the team going back to when he grew up in Los Angeles with the Raiders as his hometown team, and bringing fun back to the locker room in a cloud of victory-cigar smoke have all endeared him to the players and fans alike and maybe, just maybe, Pierce will be the man who not only brings the Raiders “back”, but keeps the Raiders “back.”