We arrived at Sunday’s Raiders-Colts game in search of comedy. Indianapolis hired Jeff Saturday off television Tuesday. At a time in the week when most teams were putting the finishing touches on their game plans, the Colts were being turned down for the play-caller role by their first in-house candidate, because they wouldn’t pay him for the privilege. They decided at the last minute to change quarterbacks and still managed to show up in Las Vegas on Sunday prepared enough to eke out their fourth win of the season.
We didn’t know it at the time, but it turns out all the laughs were about to come at Josh McDaniels’s expense.
First, some disclaimers, a kind of legal attempt at fairness: The Raiders are dealing with some injury issues. Hunter Renfrow is now done for the season. So is Darren Waller. The linebacking corps and the defensive line have seen better days.
Next, an admission of sorts: I have absolutely no idea how to feel about Jeff Saturday winning his first game as a head coach. The range of possibilities in my head right now is too vast: Maybe Colts owner Jim Irsay is a genius, and Saturday is a really good football coach? Maybe Saturday’s headset was actually just a doctored-up Fisher-Price Chatter Telephone connected to nothing, and John Fox was running the whole deal? Maybe it’s not super hard to coach an NFL football game, and we should all try it sometime? We need a bigger sample size.
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Now, on to the part where we say what everyone else must be thinking: McDaniels lost a game to a person who has never coached at any level in the NFL before, and, in terms of optics, this is about as bad as it gets. Unless Saturday was secretly corralling support among the coaching staff behind the scenes like a Senate whip, he had to win over an entire building, earn the trust of the players, don a live headset for the first time in his life (high school doesn’t count) and figure out how to manage an on-field performance that moves faster than an illegally weighted Formula One vehicle. McDaniels built his reputation on the strength of a Patriots organization that wins games by compiling one small advantage on top of another. If Sunday had been a game of Monopoly, it was as if the Raiders began with hotels across the board. The Colts won it with Baltic Avenue.
This was flat-out inexcusable. The Raiders are better in almost every way than they were a year ago, when a combination of Jon Gruden and Rich Bisaccia coached the team to the playoffs and within a few plays of beating the eventual AFC champion Bengals (this, while dealing with the fallout of Gruden’s racist and anti-LGBTQ emails being released and Gruden being fired; on top of the fallout from a horrific car crash, in which wide receiver Henry Ruggs III was speeding and intoxicated, which caused the death of a 23-year-old woman; and the everyday life of a reportedly toxic work environment). They spent money this offseason, acquired the best receiver in football (Davante Adams) and somehow rendered themselves completely incapable of winning games in a division where having a wristband-less Russell Wilson still qualifies you as competitive.
While it would seem the Raiders’ current predicament leaves them almost incapable of making a coaching change (how many former employees can Mark Davis afford to pay at once?), one has to wonder how McDaniels can face this team and inspire any modicum of confidence. As hard as we imagined it would be for Saturday to go in and convince a guy to run through the proverbial brick wall for him, it will be even harder for McDaniels to maintain an aura of preparedness or mental superiority. We will now see how long Davis can tolerate the idea that his franchise is swallowing itself whole.
That aura was the reason McDaniels was widely considered a top candidate for so many jobs over the years. The Patriots simply knew more about football than the rest of the world. McDaniels and Tom Brady were deeper into the machinations of football than we could ever comprehend. I’ve spoken to coaches who planned for everything they could have possibly imagined when it came to facing the Patriots, and still, on game day, had shivers knowing the coaching staff there was going to cook up something new.
Whatever was left of that reputation, at least as it pertains to McDaniels, is gone. His Raiders came into this game as a middling offense and a bottom-of-the-barrel defense that had some time to turn the corner. They were 0–5 in one-score games this season, and we could all see a world where luck and fortuitous ball bounces began to populate in their favor, helping them climb back toward .500. Instead, McDaniels left 0–6 in games decided by a touchdown or less and something of a scaled-down Viktor Tikhonov character in NFL history—a person who will forever carry the distinction of losing a game he had absolutely no business losing. (You can read more about Tikhonov’s very famous hockey game in the Sports Illustrated Vault.) During the game, the network sideline reporter noted shouting and frustrated utterances followed by complete silence in between offensive series. After the game, Derek Carr almost cried at the podium.
McDaniels’s most ardent defenders may point out that it’s always a grab bag when facing interim coaches. In many situations, though, interims are replacing someone who was despised, or at least merely tolerated by the organization. Saturday was replacing Frank Reich, one of the most beloved figures in football. To say the Colts came into this week emotionally wrecked would be the understatement of the year.
We don’t know what will come next for McDaniels, but it’s far from funny now. Before this weekend, the Raiders could at least point to the Midwest and tell themselves that, at the very least, they weren’t the Colts. Now, everyone else will be saying as much about Vegas. Everyone will tune in next week just to watch the chaos.
