With Josh McDaniels Fired, Mark Davis Must Find Bygone Raiders Mystique

Some time between an incompetent Monday Night Football loss to the Lions and 12:50 a.m. Eastern time Wednesday, Raiders owner Mark Davis decided he was through being told to build a football team.

To buttress the slow but budding progress of the Jon Gruden era, Davis turned to the Patriot Way, bringing both Josh McDaniels and Dave Ziegler from New England in 2022. From one force of personality, to a kind of clique of personality, the Raiders handed over the best collection of personnel the franchise had had since the turn of the millennium. The result was one playoff appearance, which was, ironically, spearheaded by the warmhearted interim head coach, Rich Bisaccia.

McDaniels won nine games in 25 tries. Some of his losses, such as dropping a game to Jeff Saturday in the television analyst’s first game as a head coach, and dropping a Thursday night game to Baker Mayfield and the Rams, with Mayfield having just gotten off a plane after being claimed off waivers Tuesday, left scars that may have been unhealable. Those kinds of losses counterbalanced any sort of momentum McDaniels was able to develop. Trading for Davante Adams set the franchise up with the expectation of immediate contention. Instead, the Raiders bungled the quarterback transition from Derek Carr to whomever their primary target was in 2023, to Jimmy Garoppolo, a player familiar with McDaniels but with a heightened risk of injury.

In that way, it was hard for the mystique of some inherited Patriots system not to wear off. And, perhaps a bit like some of his fans felt as the Gruden era went three full seasons of slashing and trading its best players without a playoff appearance, Davis probably wondered whether he was again being sold one version of the future and given another.

The choice of Antonio Pierce—the team’s linebackers coach, a former Super Bowl champion with the Giants, a successful high school head coach and an early higher-up in Herm Edwards’s Arizona State experiment (which, I would argue, was the precursor to the Deion Sanders era)—as an interim head coach may not ultimately be significant. But, I feel it may be Davis’s way of pivoting back to his roots, and the roots of his late father, Al, in taking calculated chances on upstart coaches with promise.

While the Raiders have been marred by a long-term lack of success, they have identified good coaches in the past, just installing them either before the coach was ready for the moment, or before the roster was ready for the coach. This goes all the way back to Mike Shanahan in the late 1980s, who got his first crack at a big-time job years before he would go on to revolutionize the sport with Alex Gibbs in Denver. Lane Kiffin was a Raiders head coach. Dennis Allen, now the Saints head coach and one of the more revered defensive coordinators of the last decade, was a Raiders head coach. Even Gruden, before he became a personality that superseded the person, was an offensive coordinator with the Eagles, and then the Raiders made him Jon Gruden with capital letters.

As Las Vegas embarks on the longest head-coaching search of this cycle, perhaps that will be the theme. Previous success or some league-wide stamp of approval will be less important than that certain milieu that the Davis family seems capable of picking up on. We may see a wild card in the truest sense (I have plenty of candidates here). Again, I’m not saying that the Raiders’ coach hiring process is flawless and I am not making excuses for the long-term lack of success. One must find the right person at the right time. The Raiders usually struggle with one or the other.

But during the McDaniels era, the Raiders were losing games and losing a sense of what it is like to be The Raiders. One ethos was replaced by another. While the Gruden rehire in 2018 was the culmination of years of Davis’s hopes and dreams, it, too, was a departure from his process. It bulldozed over the Rooney Rule. It handed a coach a contract larger in size and scope than almost anyone in the NFL. It made the Raiders the Grudens, and not the Gruden-led Raiders. There’s a difference.

Now, for better or worse, Davis has taken the forefront again. We have no idea where he’s going. Hell, Gruden could come walking right back through that door for all we know. It’s not always (almost never) perfect. But hopefully, it will recapture some of what Davis was looking to find over the last half decade. The good parts, anyway.