You can make the argument the most successful head coach the Raiders — previously of Oakland and now hailing from Las Vegas — have had the past two decades is … Rich Bisaccia.
This is notable because Rich Bisaccia is not a head coach.
Sure, he filled in at the position, but the longtime assistant has spent the bulk of his NFL career coaching special teams. After being promoted to the interim job following Jon Gruden’s 2021 resignation, his 7-5 regular season record led to a .583 win percentage that’s the highest of anyone who donned the headset for the Raiders since 2003. He’s responsible for half the team’s playoff appearances in those 20 years. He lost a Wild Card game by fewer than 14 points, which is the team’s postseason high water mark since Bill Callahan led the team to Super Bowl XXXVII.
This did not lead to greater opportunity. He was shown the door after that brief campaign and took a special teams role with the Green Bay Packers. The Raiders hired Josh McDaniels as his full time replacement. On Halloween night in Nevada — the wee hours of the morning on the East Coast — he was the first coach fired in 2023.
McDaniels leaves behind a 9-16 record, a scattering of come-from-ahead losses and a baffling understand of how both the game clock and scoring worked. He also leaves behind an increasingly obvious truth: the Raiders’ coaching job is haunted.
There’s something about this franchise that poisons whomever is calling the shots. For the most part, it’s been poor roster management and uninspired quarterback play. For Jon Gruden it was an inability to evolve with the NFL that went beyond whatever problems he brought — the insensitive language that led to his ousting, for one — off the field. For Jack Del Rio, it was a defensive coach who couldn’t find the escape velocity to blast through the gravity of a perpetually rancid defense.
Dennis Allen? Tom Cable? Hue Jackson? Lane Kiffin? They never had a chance.
This is the curse of the Raiders top job, a vacancy that will never go to the best candidate on the market because that is not what the Raiders do. They perpetually settle for retreads and assistants who haven’t risen above the fray as proven play-callers, yet get a rocket strapped to their back.
McDaniels had an 11-17 record in a season-plus in a previous stint as the Denver Broncos’ head coach before getting fired; he got the call anyway. Gruden had been a media personality for nearly a decade; he got the call anyway. Art Shell had been out of the game for six years; he got the call anyway. All failed in different ways, but failed spectacularly nonetheless.
Maybe that changes in 2024. Maybe Mark Davis, after being lambasted by fans over his latest awful hiring, decides to make a cultural shift. This is unlikely, given the entire existence of the Raiders franchise under the Davis family’s ownership, but not impossible. The thing is; who would want the job?
Even an upper crust candidate would have to deal with two decades of football that rarely scraped the face of mediocrity. Oakland/Las Vegas has ranked among the top 19 teams when it comes to points allowed just once in the past two decades — 2006, when it finished 18th in a two-win campaign. The Raiders have fielded a top 10 scoring offense twice in that span.
The franchise’s drafting is a perpetual blind spot. Since 2003 the team has earned 14 first-team All-Pro honors — one more than the sad-sack Cleveland Browns, the NFL’s standard bearers of sadness. That’s great, but more than half those awards have gone to special teamers and exactly half belong to punters (six for Shane Lechler, one for AJ Cole).
The Raiders’ most recent homegrown defensive All-Pro was Khalil Mack, who the team decided not to extend and instead traded to the Chicago Bears. Their most recent homegrown offensive All-Pro is Josh Jacobs, who the team also decided not to extend and who may be playing out his string in 2023 (albeit in a reduced capacity compared to his breakthrough 2022).
Is this a case of bad coaches failing to develop talent? A front office failing to provide its coaches with a roster capable of contention? Some unholy combination of both?
Either way, the upside of coaching in Las Vegas is wholly dimmed by the organization within. If you’re an upstart candidate interviewing for jobs this winter, what exactly is drawing you to the Raiders over, say, the Los Angeles Chargers or Tampa Bay Buccaneers or, hell, a non-Dan Snyder-owned Washington Commanders team?
That’s why any discussion about 2024’s hottest coaching candidates and rising stars will include an indelible asterisk when it comes to the Raiders’ job. There is a stink that followed this franchise from California to Nevada, and no amount of scrubbing has been able to erase it. Las Vegas isn’t a coaching job, it’s a longform experiment in mediocrity, the answer to a hypothesis that has never been fully thought out and possibly never will.
Josh McDaniels never had a chance, not that he would have been able to do anything with it if he had. The next man up will inherit Davante Adams, Maxx Crosby and a solid offensive line. He’ll also get Mark Davis, the ghost of Jimmy Garoppolo and a roster that’s soundly below average just about everywhere else.
Good luck.
