Raiders Coach Has A Way To Erase ‘Moral Victories’

The Las Vegas Raiders have been far more competitive than most people expected them to be, and they’re hearing a lot about “moral victories” when it comes to two of their last three losses against the Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills, respectively. 

But coach Klint Kubiak is leading the charge to eliminate the term from his team’s vocabulary, and it’s been a steady part of his messaging from the start. Kubiak knows he’s doing a total rebuild after last year’s 3-14 season, but he doesn’t want his team buying into the idea that these kinds of losses are somehow acceptable. 

His direct message was to say he’s very disappointed that the team couldn’t get it done against the Bills, and he followed that emphatically by saying “We are not satisfied with any moral victories.”

For the rest of us, though, it’s easy enough to look at the situation that way. The Raiders were playing a team that’s won a playoff game in six consecutive seasons, per Sam Warren of The Athletic, and the Raiders lost by just three points. They did the same against the Chiefs, who were led by a quarterback who’s defined winning and Super Bowls for the last decade in the NFL. 

The Raiders talked some about fighting hard and starting a foundation to build on after the Kansas City loss, but that kind of talk is being eliminated. Backup guard Caleb Rogers noted that there’s no stat for moral victories, and he talked about closing and finishing out games instead. 

The initial goal in Las Vegas was to raise the team’s level and standard of competition, but that was accomplished when the team unexpectedly went 3-0. But Kubiak comes from a winning culture with the Seattle Seahawks, as Warren noted, and he just got a Super Bowl ring at the beginning of the year. 

Tight end Michael Mayer echoed Kubiak’s stated goal, saying that “the standard is winning.” He said that Kubiak has been about winning since he stepped in the door, and Mayer is one of the players who embodies that approach, as he’s a tough, no-quit tight end who embodies that approach in the way he plays. 

The competition doesn’t get any easier going forward. The Los Angeles Rams may have stumbled against the Arizona Cardinals on Sunday, but they set the standard for winning last season, and Kubiak left reporters with a final note on how he intends to eliminate the “moral victory” expression from his team’s vocabulary by saying “close games out.”