NFL First Thoughts: Las Vegas Raiders
Josh McDaniels' second head coaching job might end the same way his first one did.
Below is a transcript from The Simple Handicap podcast (listen here), presented by Right Angle Sports. We’ll be doing a first-look preview of all 32 NFL teams, followed by more complete team previews prior to the season. Interested in signing up for the RAS NFL service? Join here.
It seems like 2023 could be very problematic for the Las Vegas Raiders for a number of different reasons.
Let’s start with coach Josh McDaniels. Something is not working between McDaniels, Raiders ownership and the roster. Last year, he effectively drove QB Derek Carr off the team in order to get Jarrett Stidham, a guy he worked with in New England, before giving him the starting role. With three games to go, Carr got benched, Stidham was pegged as starter, and then performed extremely well. In a way, McDaniels perhaps saved his job hitching himself to Stidham, showing that this was possibly the plan moving forward. And at the time, everybody pretty much had the expectation that Stidham would be the guy leading the offense going into the upcoming season.
It didn’t take long for Stidham to drop the Raiders from his plans. He departed in early March, and suddenly McDaniels no longer had Carr or Stidham and was left with an empty quarterback position. So what did he do? He brought in Jimmy Garoppolo from the 49ers, a guy who has spent much of his career relying on Kyle Shanahan, one of the best offensive minds in the league. Now Garoppolo will become the starting QB on a new team for the first time in his career without Shanahan. Just a couple weeks after signing, it was reported that Garoppolo will undergo foot surgery. At no point prior to him becoming a Raider did anybody know anything about the foot injury. Then McDaniels tried to save face saying he knew the procedure, the details of which are still very murky, needed to be done. In the end, we had the unwelcome surprise of the starting QB getting a surgery in March.
Remember, also last year, three weeks into the season, McDaniels had closed-door meetings with ownership after the 0-3 start. That happened three other times during the season as well that were openly reported, directly correlating to his performance as coach of the team.
Fast forward to May 2023, a month ago, Davante Adams, a key wide receiver, biggest playmaker for the Raiders, comes out and says he doesn’t see eye-to-eye on the direction of the franchise.
So you have all these various issues, past and present, and then the biggest of them all: There simply isn’t much top-line talent on this roster. It’s comparable to the Rams roster from last year. They had elite, top-level talent across the board, but all it took for them to be a disaster was a couple early-season key injuries. The Raiders are really similar. They have nowhere near the top-level talent the Rams had, but when you look at the difference in first-string talent on offense and defense for the Raiders, and who would potentially replace them in the event of injury, it is a stark contrast. It’s an enormous drop-off that rivals any other team in the league in terms of the biggest drop-off from starters to backups.
There seems to be so much working against the Raiders that it’s hard to see this season ending positively for them.