After five straight losses leading to a 2-7 record this season, the Raiders have taken drastic action. Sunday night they fired OC Luke Getsy after just nine game with the team and also let go of two other members of the offensive staff.
While as of Monday morning, Antonio Pierce was not ready to name a replacement, he did going into what he thinks went wrong that led to the firing and what he’s looking for in the next offensive play caller.
Let’s start with what went wrong.
“When I look at the last nine weeks, I just look at a bunch of things,” said Pierce. “I’ll just start with turnovers. I don’t care what team you are, who you have at quarterback, who’s your head coach, who’s your OC, you’re not going to win games when you turn the ball over at the rate we’ve been turning the ball over pretty much three times a game. Especially 13 in the last five.
“I think we’ve had enough opportunities to punch the ball in, to give our team an opportunity to win games and we haven’t done that. And that’s really a compilation of everything. That goes from play caller to the play of our players to execution to details to the confidence that we’re playing with.
“A lot of those things factor into it. Some of it is shocking. Because I think when we left training camp we felt good about this group and our team. Obviously we did get hit with injuries, but that’s no excuse because every team in the league is dealing with that as well. But I think offensively it just wasn’t going the way I wanted it to go and it didn’t look the way I wanted it to look.”
It’s honestly strange for Pierce to suggest they felt good about how the offense looked coming out of camp considering he never got what he wanted which was one of the two quarterback to step up and say ‘I’m the guy‘. He himself said he was giving Gardner Minshew the first quarter of the season to keep the job and then benched him after five games.
As to the other issues, yeah, much of that falls on the OC. The run game issues in particular, which were the reasons for the missed opportunities like happened in the loss to the Chiefs last week.
As for what he’s looking for in a new OC.
“Matching the philosophy and the idea of what I preach which is physicality, ability to run the ball, taking shots down the field, protecting the football first and foremost, disciplined up front,” Pierce added.
“We got to do what’s best and gives us the best opportunity to win. Whatever that may be. If it’s throwing the ball 60 times, fine. If it’s running it 60 times, fine. But we got to find a balance and an identity on offense going forward.”
This strikes at the heart of the complaints against Getsy’s approach. How it seemed like his decisions were based too much around trying to do what the defense didn’t expect as opposed to sticking with what worked. In consecutive games this season against the Rams and Chiefs, at the most critical times, he abandoned what was working in favor of what was not and it killed the Raiders chance of punching it in for the score.
So, the moral here seems to be that many of the Raiders issues don’t fall on Getsy and thus it seems unlikely this change is going to miraculously make things better. But enough of it was Getsy that a change needed to be made if this team is at least able to capitalize on their opportunities and not fall flat each time.
