Two things can be true at once: The Las Vegas Raiders received plenty of praise for hiring Seattle Seahawks offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak as their new head coach, but the move still didn’t rank all that high when compared to other recent coaching hires.
How is this possible? Jeff Howe of The Athletic did the rating article, so let’s pull back the curtain a little and see what kind of criteria he used.
Start with the numbers. The total number of rankings was nine, but there were several ties involved, including the Raiders. They wound up rated seventh (ouch!), tied with the Tennessee Titans, who just added San Francisco defensive coordinator Robert Saleh as their new coach.
Howe quoted an unnamed NFL executive who provided a succinct explanation for what happened here.
“From a football mind, an OC, Klint is a stud,” an executive said. “I think Klint will do great. Really good human, and he’s going to work his butt off. But there are institutional issues in Vegas.”
Institutional issues. Pithy phrasing, but it glosses over the problem. How about this instead?
The Raiders are still the Raiders.
More words, but more direct, too. Howe added that the Raiders have fired four head coaches since 2021, and they’ve had a new GM start each of the last three seasons. That’s a lot of turnover—or, as Howe put it, “too many people with too many different visions in too short a time"—and it’s fair to wonder as he did if this isn’t a teardown instead of a rebuild.
That’s not going to happen, but Kubiak does have some things going for him. He turned around quarterback Sam Darnold then nursed him all the way through a Super Bowl win, and he also turned Jaxon Smith-Njigba into the Offensive Player of the Year. During the game itself, Kubiak stayed disciplined, sticking with a physical running game that managed to pop several big plays against the New England Patriots.
The Raiders also have the top pick in the draft, and Howe called Kubiak a good fit for the playing style of consensus top pick quarterback Fernando Mendoza. The Raiders also have plenty of cap space if Kubiak and GM John Spytek can get on the same page with the personnel they need, to there are reasons for hope. As Howe noted, though, the finish line is a long, long way down the road.