The Las Vegas Raiders dismantled the New York Giants in Week 9 30-6 under interim head coach Antonio Pierce. This win showed a lot about the 2023 Raiders as a team, but mostly, it illustrated just how incompetent fired head coach Josh McDaniels was.
Raiders owner Mark Davis never should have hired McDaniels in the first place.
First, after Davis had to fire Jon Gruden following the coach’s email scandal, Rich Bisaccia took over and did an excellent job. The interim head coach went 7-5 down the stretch and took the Raiders to the playoffs, accomplishing something Gruden never could.
Unlike his father Al, though, who was drawn to the unpolished underdog, Mark Davis wanted another big name to coach the team and jettisoned the right choice in Bisaccia for the big name of the day, Bill Belichick’s right-hand man, Josh McDaniels.
There were some red flags before McDaniels got to Vegas that should have scared Davis off.
Almost no Belichick assistants have ever had success as the head coach of their own teams. McDaniels also failed miserably as head coach of the Denver Broncos, and no one from that experience speaks highly of him. And he accepted the Indianapolis Colts head job just two years earlier and backed out at the last minute.
Still, Davis made the hire, and it predictably blew up in his face. The Raiders Week 9 win over the Giants proved just how incompetent McDaniels was in several ways.
Not using the offensive weapons
The biggest knock on McDaniels was that he had several incredible offensive weapons at his disposal and didn’t know how or simply refused to use them.
Wide receiver Davante Adams, running back Josh Jacobs, and slot receiver Hunter Renfrow are all among the best at their respective positions, but they all languished this season under McDaniels.
On Sunday with Raiders interim head coach Antonio Pierce at the helm, Jacobs had 17 carries for 98 yards and two touchdowns, Adams had seven targets, and Renfrow got two catches. The team’s best offensive weapons got involved, and the team won going away.
Strike one for McDaniels.
Messing up the quarterback position
Rookie Aidan O’Connell started and won the game for the Raiders in Week 9 vs the Giants, going 16-fo-25 for 209 yards with no interceptions.
McDaniels' first mistake with the quarterback was running Derek Carr out of town with no clear backup plan at the end of last season. Carr isn’t Tom Brady, but he’s an above-average NFL QB, and not all teams have that.
Then he brought in Jimmy Garoppolo, a more fragile Carr doppelganger, and drafted defensive end Tyree Wilson over Will Levis. Las Vegas did take O’Connell late, though, to give them some credit.
Once the season started and Garoppolo predictably got injured, McDaniels gave O’Connell a brief chance but then turned to 38-year-old Patriots retread Brian Hoyer to start Week 7. That turned into an embarrassing 30-12 loss to the lowly Chicago Bears.
McDaniels should have stuck with O’Connell after Jimmy G went down to show the team he cared about the future and wasn’t stuck in his Patriots past. Starting Hoyer firmly did the latter, which seems to have lost a good chunk of the locker room.
Strike two for McDaniels.
The Raiders players seemed to flat-out dislike him
Several things on the field in the Raiders Week 9 win over the Giants showed how incompetent Josh McDaniels was. However, the biggest illustration of just how bad he was happened after the game when the team celebrated like they won the Super Bowl.
Following the big 24-point win, there were few happier places on earth than the Raiders locker room. People were smoking victory cigars, coaches were giving game balls to players, players were giving game balls to coaches, and everything seemed like amazing vibes.
This was following a report by Jay Glazer that just before the firing there was a team meeting where players ripped their head coach, and when Antonio Pierce stood up to defend his boss and mentioned his Giants beating the Patriots back in 2007, McDaniels told Pierce not to talk about the Pats like that again.
When a group of coworkers literally throw a massive party after the boss gets let go, you know it was bad, and that is strike three against McDaniels.
While McDaniels should have never been the Raiders head coach in the first place, the silver lining here is that Davis pulled the trigger early enough to potentially save the team's season. Las Vegas heads into Week 10 at 4-5 and facing the New York Jets. If they can win that game and even their record with seven to play, the playoffs aren't out of the question.
And that would be the ultimate mark of McDaniels' incompetence.
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