Josh McDaniels, Dave Ziegler, Mick Lombardi, Jimmy Garrapolo, the four horsemen of the football apocalypse. All Pestilence and like pestilence has come and gone, leaving behind a diseased wake. The worst thing that can happen to a football team is the culture dying. It is easier to hire a great coach or find a great quarterback than it is to build a team’s culture. Culture is a big key to high-level success in professional football. One of the reasons that football can be considered a great sport is because to be successful all 11 of your players have to be able to not only play at the highest level of football but be able to sustain that level of play. It is a true 52-man sport. Some teams rely on a couple of star players to be the difference that pushes them over the edge, but if any part of that greater machine is failing, they are bound to fail in the long run. Often one of the most under-looked aspects by a team’s staff is the team’s culture. Culture is one of those concepts in football like momentum. It is hard to define, harder to grasp and measure, harder still to know when it is truly happening, and hardest of all is to excise it at will, but it is a very real thing that teams have to be aware of, ask anybody in football. Teams spend years building their cultures. Bill Belichick spent years building a culture of ruthless dominance at the Patriots as a well-oiled Superbowl machine, winning 6 out of 9 Superbowls. Early on he established that no one was bigger than the team when he benched Bledsoe and after 3 Superbowls you have won enough where everybody buys into what you are selling. The Packers by decades of great football and while hampered by limited success are still able to carry on a winning culture despite coaching and key player changes in part due to the team’s stature as a team that wins, their culture. But there are flipsides, like the Browns who have lost so much and failed so many times that it seems impossible for them to win. They have a losing culture that they are fighting like hell to lose, but real success still eludes them, and bad decisions like Deshaun Watson hanging over their head like a cheating husband in a bad marriage. But they never had a culture of success like the Cowboys, who in the NFL’s infancy dominated and played some of the greatest football of all time in the 90s with Jerry Jones dubbing his team “America’s Team” creating this great football persona of the ‘Dallas Cowboys’ that every player dreamed of playing for and one of the largest fanbases in the nation, but is still only barely standing on the shaky foundations of old legends, haunted by decades of playoff failures, and by now is mostly just marketing and drunk idiots at buffalo wild wings.
The Raiders built a culture of tough brutal competition and dominance through rough physical play that dominated the 1970s and 80s leading to three superbowl wins and a dedicated fanbase in LA and Oakland. The fanbase that had grown in Oakland became the heart of the team and even after the team last tasted success in a trip to the Superbowl in 2002 that ultimately ended with failure and a great football conspiracy, the fanbase remained strong. The attitude of those ’70s and ’80s Raiders teams had rubbed off onto the fans. So passionate about a team that struggled to win that they built the reputation that those old Raiders teams had built. All memes and jokes about Raiders fans being in prison and going to the Oakland Coliseum and getting stabbed aside, there is something to be said about a fanbase that still has passion for a team, despite prolonged failure and embarrassment. The heart of the raiders remained alive. That’s what made the brief shimmer of hope in the 2016 season seem so magical, and Derek Carrs season-ending injury right before the playoffs all the more tragic. With the team failing to recapture that success and the heartbreaking relocation from Oakland a question hung over the team. What will become of the beating heart of the franchise and what will that mean for the culture?
Jon Grudens football style was always supposed to be based on a solid understanding of the game, the x’s and o’s as he would say, and his player-centric coaching style which worked great in Oakland, and then for his Superbowl win with the Buccaneers (tragically against his own raiders team), but in his second tenure with the raiders struggled to build anything and for the few years he was there he led a middling raiders team amid a massive move from Oakland to Las Vegas, that ultimately blew up in his banishment from the NFL, the DUI resulting in the death of innocent people by the young breaking out Henry Ruggs, and the nonstop controversy of the 2021 season. It seemed like the Raiders weren’t just dead in the water, but shot violently and left to bleed out in the dark it seemed, but Mark Davis’s choice for interim Rich Bissacia shined brightly in the dark and the rest of the team rallied behind him, and they managed to squeak into the playoffs despite all the adversity. Only to lose by one score to the eventual AFC champions. It seemed like the magic was back. Despite the almost insurmountable challenges that faced them the team rallied together and managed to win enough with the pieces they had to get into the playoffs in a tough conference, that is culture. And looking at the future 2022 season the Raiders had all the momentum, despite a tough playoff loss it had felt miraculous that they were even there, and they were back on the track to glory. But then came the first hiccup. Mark Davis chose not to hire Rich Bisaccia. I do not blame Mark Davis for not hiring Bisaccia. Bisaccia did struggle mightily during his very brief tenure as head coach, and in a division with the dynasty chiefs, you have to be able to compete with them, and the Raiders getting absolutely and totally spanked by the chiefs that season makes Bisaccia a tough pill to swallow as a head coach if you are the owner. But he had earned the love of the fans and the absolute devotion of the players, which is one of the hardest parts of the job and did deserve a chance. But alas he got beat out by the pair of Josh McDaniels and Dave Zeigler, a very bitter and very tough pill for many to swallow, as Josh McDaniels is another in a long line of failed Belichick coaching tree head coaches, and potentially one of the worst, and made to sting all the worse by the heartbreaking departure of Rich Bisaccia. Say what you want about Bisaccia but he handwrote letters to every player on the team after the Bengals loss. Not a lot of head coaches doing that. But football is a business where all that matters is how much you win and how much money you bring in, the two often hand in hand, and this was quickly forgotten when McDaniels and Ziegler brought in future HOF WR Davante Adams and college teammate of Derek Carr. Bisaccia seemed like an unfortunate speed bump on the highway to a Superbowl. If the Raiders were a car on the highway to the Super Bowl, the wheels came flying off a couple of minutes into the drive. Terrible game after terrible game, momentous leads slashed by collapse more ridiculous than the last and it became clear almost immediately that the team played with no love and Josh Mcdaniels was struggling to lead the team and establish a meaningful connection with the team, and the results showed on the field. A team with extreme talent, but dysfunctional and mismanaged at every level. Josh McDonald’s had tried to install the patriot way at the Raiders, which was doomed to fail from the get-go because it was the antithesis of the way the Raiders had just played and grown together as a team, and the locker room never bought in. After a dismal 2022 season in which the team looked terrible, McDaniels and Ziegler decided to move on from Derek Carr. Derek Carr was a controversial quarterback who later in his career put up behemoth numbers that any QB would be very proud of. The QB gets most of the glory but since the team could never be successful, always plagued by bottom-tier defenses, Derek Carr got too much of the blame for 2022 and Josh McDaniels gave his head for it throwing him under the bus, not even delaying his own fate from the very same bus. Like Derek Carr or not, believe that he was no more than a stat padder we could win with, or believe that his team let him down, it does not matter, he was always loved and was loyal to the Raiders and gave the team his all and the team believed in him as their leader, and he did not deserve to be axed as harshly as he was. Derek Carr truly appreciated what makes any team great its fandom, as shown in his goodbye to the black hole. Pestilence has a face. A very pretty face, the kind of face that looks like it’s been kissed by the sun reflecting off the bright blue waters of an Italian beach, sailing on the Mediterranean in some sort of scene that only really exists in paintings. I remember very distinctly being in an Uber the day the Raiders signed Jimmy Garopolo. It was one of those quiet Uber rides where the only words exchanged were a confirmation of identity and destination with the silence only broken by the talk radio the driver was listening to quietly. It was a stock sports am talk radio show with the hosts giving the standard media opinions on the move, which was already being trashed. I asked the driver if he was a fan of the Raiders and he said yes and we began talking about the impending season. It became clear that we both hated the trade immediately. The ink hadn’t been dry for 24 hours and already to some fans, the season was over months before it began. Jimmy Garopolo had seen success in his career but it always seemed despite Garopolo. He had hoped after his four games of play after Brady was suspended and he even managed to go all the way to the Superbowl with the 49ers but the common consensus was always that this was because of the great teams he played on, not because of the great play of Jimmy Garopolo. Look at the way people handle the questions around Brock Purdy’s success vs when Jimmy Garopolo was in that same position. And the result was exactly what everyone expected, some of the most uninspiring football play led by the four horsemen of the Raiders apocalypse, Josh McDaniels, Dave Ziegler, Mick Lombardi, and Jimmy Garopolo. The raiders had long become comfortable with irrelevancy, but Josh McDaniels took it from small dumpster fire to full-blown dump fire. Every piece of the machine failed, with Garopolo injured and benched, the star WR Davante Adams unhappy, star RB Josh Jacobs unhappy, the o-line falling apart, the d-line struggling, offense and defense struggling, even the elite talent and tenacity of Maxx Crosby, and the elite kicking unit, the future looks dark for the raiders.
A big part of why a lot of coaches fail is they aren’t given enough time to develop a team and impatient owners cut them when in just a couple of more years would have had a real chance at winning and the impatience only resulted in prolonged trouble. Josh McDaniels isn’t one of them. I think Mark Davis did the right thing by wanting and openly saying that he planned to give Josh McDaniels multiple years despite his limited success, but it was way too much. After the end of the season and the disgraceful departure of Derek Carr, it was only cemented. Josh McDaniels should have never been on that field and is still one of the most baffling choices in a long list of baffling choices Mark Davis has made. One can only imagine Mark Davis interviewing Josh McDaniels for the head coaching position taking the lion’s share of credit for whatever success he floated along for during his time at the Patriots while downplaying his snakery at the Broncos and Colts and probably doing his best to avoid mentioning that he drafted tim tebow(no shade at tim tebow). All the while mark davis and his dumbass hair cut drooling at the very delusion that this man might be able to turn the las vegas riders into some twisted visage of the Patriots, his very own Super Bowl machine. But Josh Mcdaniels is no more than a lucky idiot surrounded by talent and a dumb visor and I must now believe ghosts aren’t real, because if they were surely the specters of 3 old dead raiders legends would have taken him on a spiritual journey showing him all his terrible football past, present, and future, a la ebenezer scrooge, and convinced him to quit coaching football and sell used cars like he was born to do. But the plague is gone, and it seemed that 2021 was repeating itself as McDaniels’s replacement was capturing a lot of excitement as another rich Bisaccia pick, a player-centric coach who all the players loved and backed. Antonio Pierce ended the season very strong, but he did have some not-great moments, like an 0-3 loss to the Vikings (0-3 I hope not symbolic to Antonio’s future with the Raiders), but he did very well with what he had and with certain players stepping up like the condor Maxx Crosby himself, Antonio Pierce secured the head coaching job, but the real thing that put him out on top was the Christmas upset vs the chiefs. Pierce proved that he could put together a game plan with a limited team that could beat a team as good as the Reid-Mahomes Kansas City Chiefs.
Lately, in the NFL there has been a lot of talk about culture. The slow death of the Patriots culture with Bill Belichick’s tenure unceremoniously ending. the birthing of a loser culture in Dallas under the mounting pressure of continuing playoff losses. The reversal of the losing culture in Detroit at the hands of Dan Cambell and the Lions almost unheard of advance to the NFC championship. The Raiders are trying to do what Detroit has done. Turn an unsuccessful team around by building a strong and resilient culture at the organization and get the foundation of the team right instead of chasing after success like a kid running after a balloon slowly flying away. Antonio Pierce understands that and wants to bring back what the Raiders used to do; tough, physical football and a culture of determined physicality. There has been a lot of discussion and controversy around Pierce’s organization wanting to enact own their version of the “Jordan rules” (kind of ironic considering the Detroit Pistons were originally inspired by the physicality of the Raiders). But that’s a good thing. Patrick Mahomes is still young and the Chiefs are still at full steam, if the Raiders want to have a chance at competing in a division that just added Jim Harbaugh at the Justin Herbert lead Chargers and Sean Payton at the Broncos, ruled by the dynasty Chiefs they are going to have to key into the part of their identity that is rough, that is physical because Mahomes isn’t going to slow down for a rookie QB. I was upset when Mark Davis didn’t hire Rich Bisaccia because I felt that it was a spit in the face to the really good progress and team that the Raiders had made that year. But the right choice was made this time and I believe Antonio has a really good chance at finding some success as a Raiders head coach I hope that he can keep the team together and keep building on what he already built at the Raiders. But as a Raiders fan who has seen some of the worst, I will keep my breath held and my fingers crossed until the Raiders have managed to obtain some real success on the field. But I believe them this time, a common fool’s last words, but I really do.
