The NFL is becoming weirder with every week. If you doubt that, let us present Saquon Barkley's airborne rear end as the first thing you see when he and it sail over your head. It's becoming too hard to keep up with all of the concussion-infused nonsense in this league, especially in a week in which two teams with one win on the season triumphed on the same day.
But then, just as your disorientation is threatening to swallow you whole, there are the Las Vegas Raiders. To call them a pillar of stability would be inaccurate, but damn if they aren’t reliable. Their gift for ass-backwardness (hello again, Saquon) is overwhelming, and after a loss on Sunday they defenestrated three of their most prominent offensive coaches—nine months after those coaches were hired, and nine games into the current season.
Head coach Antonio Pierce celebrated the team's fifth consecutive loss, a standard issue 17-point waxing by Cincinnati that dropped the Raiders into a six-way tie for the league’s worst record at 2-7, by firing offensive coordinator Luke Getsy, offensive line coach James Cregg, and quarterbacks coach Rich Scangarello. He hired all of them in February, which suggests they went bad on him in record time.
The decision won't draw the same level of WTFery that the New Orleans Saints will get for firing coach Dennis Allen (a former Raiders head coach) in the middle of a flame war between former wide receiver Michael Thomas and current quarterback Derek Carr (also a former Raider). But that's only because we expect the Raiders to do stuff like this—assembling an offensive coaching tree and nine months later cutting it down, yanking the stump out of the yard, and mulching the lot. It's what they do, year after self-parodic year—assuming they have assembled the necessary talent to win, proceeding not to do so, and then blaming the coaching side for failing to develop that lack of talent.
The gaps in that train of logic are significant enough to make it more of an abandoned caboose, which will change nothing. The Raiders do this too often for it not to be factored into the grand plan. More coaches and assistants have been hired and fired by these guys since the 2002 Super Bowl, their last moment of glory, than by any other team. This makes sense because only one team has lost more games in that time than the Raiders. What makes it truly Raideresque is the inability or unwillingness to see any relationship between the two.
Rarely, though, does a team's head coach get so fed up with people he has hired that he fires them halfway into their first season—and not just one of them but three. By this logic, Pierce hates the playcalling, the blocking that makes those plays succeed or fail, and the quarterbacks (three so far) tasked with making it all work. If you have seen the Raiders do any of those things, this is understandable enough, but still remarkable given that the season is just nine weeks old. The Raiders also traded away their disgruntled WR1, Davante Adams, so he could realize his lifelong dream of going 6-11 with the Jets; this all suggests that Pierce only approves of running back Alexander Mattison and his 301 yards, and running backs coach Cadillac Williams, just to name two more people brought in as part of the Pierce Era.
And when we say Era, we do that knowing that the average Raiders head coach lasts 28 games before being fired. That means they get a full year, plus a second year that ends at Thanksgiving. Pierce surely realizes this and is determined to get all the things he wants in the remaining 19 games of his own tenure—a new locker room, a better front office, an owner who pays more attention to his WNBA team, the growing possibility that this could all be Tom Brady's problem soon enough. The one thing Pierce doesn't have, of course, is time, but he knew this gig was as dangerous as it was temporary when he took it.
We applaud his impetuousness in this instance, though. Not because there is anything wronger about Getsy, Cregg, and Scangarello than anyone else on any other team, but because if you're only hanging around awhile, you may as well get to hang up the wallpaper you want. It will make no difference, of course, because the roster is the roster and gravity wins every time, but this mass deletion of offensive decision-makers is still useful as a demonstration of the kind of infuriated panic that makes the Raiders the Raiders, every single year. They are running out of ways to surprise us, but this one stuck the landing in a new way, both in timing and bulk.
Now the fun morphs into something new, and also very Raideresque—guessing their next response to the ongoing freefall. They've demoted, they've traded, and now they've fired their way to two wins and seven losses. There’s no sense that the record somehow doesn’t reflect the team’s capacities, and there aren't a lot of new ways for Pierce to show his displeasure with what he has helped create and what his superiors have perpetuated. Having the players' cars towed after a listless practice? Subletting the locker room on Airbnb and making the players shower and change outside? Forfeiting the Jaguars game three days before Christmas and claiming afterward that the players don't deserve the right to lose in the NFL? Watching Pierce figure out his next angry move, for good or ill, might even make the Raiders watchable again, in that “YouTube video of a flash flood in a foreign country” kind of way, but the overarching truth remains as it has always been:
You work for the Raiders for the Raiders' right to eventually work you.
