To take the old saying and mangle it in the back shop a bit, you cannot hope to beat the Las Vegas Raiders because they are so easy to contain. The latest person to learn this lesson is their 12-game-old head coach.
Antonio Pierce was advertised as the franchise’s latest savior, the coach that this historically listless roster would respond to after enduring The Josh McDaniels Experience; with Pierce setting the example, the team would vibrate with joyful devotion to the greater cause. So trusting. So naive. But these are the Raiders, who have talked it while steadfastly refusing to walk it for two full decades and change now. This is an organization that goes from "Hey, who's the new guy?" to "Hey, when are we getting a new guy?" with uncommon swiftness. It's why, since they lost Super Bowl The 37th back in 'Ought Two, Raiders coaches have averaged 26 games between hiring and firing. That's barely a season and a half.
Pierce is halfway there, but now he knows the deal. Gravity is a mean bastard.
After watching his squad register a team-wide DNP-DGAF in a halfway-to-desultory 36-22 loss to the unfathomably awful Carolina Panthers, Pierce went to the modern coach's last motivational resort—"I'm already sick to death of most of you, and my only regret is that I can't fire you all now." Now there's an inspirational speech to make the fellows damn the bullets and take the beach.
But let's not paraphrase when we can quote directly: “I think there were definitely some individuals who made business decisions, and we’ll make business decisions going forward as well,” he said at the Raiders' traditional postgame Podium Of Shame. "We got our ass whupped. I would have booed us too."
Oh, have we mentioned that this was the Raiders' home opener after a momentarily impressive win at Baltmore? They came home as the most mortal of locks, hosting a team that had been outscored 73-13 in its first two games and just ditched its ostensible franchise quarterback, the first overall pick just a year ago, for a refurbished ginger, possibly at the behest of the most meddlesome and least football-competent owner in the sport. What could go wrong?
We will now wait over here in the corner until you stop laughing and pointing at us. It’s rude.
The whole thing was. The game details are pretty ordinary—the Raiders allowed the worst team in football 450 yards, forced no turnovers, and had the ball for barely 24 minutes. Pierce is correct that they did indeed get their asses "whupped." With the Raiders, this sort of thing happens all the time; they win barely a third of their games, they are the second poorest team in the sport since that Super Bowl loss, and have allowed almost 2000 more points than they have scored during that stretch. Taken in that broader contest, “Panthers 36, Raiders 22 in the home opener” is exactly who the Raiders are, and what they have been for the last four presidents.
But Pierce, positive motivator and relative coaching newbie that he is, hadn't gotten the unvarnished view until Sunday. At the podium, after getting torched by (and there is no nice way to say this) Andy Dalton, it suddenly seemed to dawn on Pierce that the same crippling malaise that has been Raiders football still is still Raiders football. He decided that yelling at them in the privacy of the locker room wasn't nearly enough shame—itself something of a hopeful gesture, in that it presumes they could in fact be shamed.
So Pierce did it where everyone could see and hear it, his purposeful disgust turning him into a menacing metronome. When asked by some softball tosser with a credential what positives he could take from the game, Pierce said succinctly, “Nothing.” Even in Dallas, at least the players care enough to turn on each other.
None of the 13 coaches the Raiders have employed in the last 21 years have figured out how to embrace/inspire/scare this team sufficiently; Rich Bisaccia, who inspired a brief blip of competence as an interim coach, seems in retrospect mostly to have startled them. That Pierce, who had a similar interim bounce and was by all accounts the locker room’s choice as a McDaniels replacement, is hitting his first motivational wall after three games of his first full season is not a healthy sign for the future. Then again, what would be, presuming that “actually beating the Panthers” is off the table?
The NFL is an odd place right now, even by its own typically twisted atmospherics; nearly everything in it has regressed to a dull gray mean after only three spins of the wheel. The defending champion Chiefs are undefeated, but have won by only seven, one, and five in those wins. The Vikings are—oh, but let's leave that one to Comrade Magary and his delusions. But even in a season of room-temperature parity, the Raiders are never not the Raiders, which means Pierce's manifesto will likely land the way all the other ones have—with the players sending him side-eyes and more 85-percent efforts.
The team may believe in Pierce as a concept, and it seemed at the time to be a perfectly reasonable idea, but the Raiders as a reality are exactly this, and will remain so until they prove otherwise. If Pierce is brandishing a fistful of pink slips at his roster without the actual power to distribute them—and he isn't the general manager, after all—the rest of his season will be standard-issue painful, and the pink slip he finds may well be his own.
After, like the prototypical Raider coach, 26 games.
