The Las Vegas Raiders have been the NFL’s biggest running joke for the last few months, but there’s finally some hope for the fan base. The Raiders are getting plenty of praise for the Klint Kubiak hire as their new coach, and that’s putting them in play for one of the league’s favorite story lines.
The NFL loves to sell the “worst-to-first” concept to pump up parity and generate excitement, and fans and media love to take the bait. Bradley Locker of Pro Football Focus recently did a piece on the odds of the eight last-place divisional finishers making the leap, and surprisingly, the Raiders didn’t rank last.
Thank goodness for the Jets, right? The New York Jets ranked last, of course, but the Raiders also came out ahead of the Arizona Cardinals to finish at sixth, which truly is remarkable if you watched the team at all in the second half of the season.
So what’s the logic behind this ranking? Is there any?? Actually, Locker made a decent case for the Raiders doing this, and he’d probably make a pretty good defense lawyer if he ever decides to do a career change.
The basis for his ranking was what happened in the AFC West this season. The Kansas City Chiefs struggled, then plummeted when quarterback Patrick Mahomes got hurt. The Los Angeles Chargers struggled, then righted the ship, but they couldn’t get out of their own way in the playoffs. The Denver Broncos became a juggernaut, but then their quarterback, Bo Nix, broke his ankle when a Super Bowl berth was within reach.
It’s all an example of how fast things can change in the NFL. Lightning probably won’t strike the AFC West in back-to-back season, but the possibility is there, and it will be until the actual games start in September.
More to the point, the Raiders actually seem to have a new coach who knows what he’d doing in Klint Kubiak. Yes, we said the same thing about Pete Carroll last year, but Kubiak is coming off a Super Bowl win, plus the Raiders have the top pick in the upcoming draft.
They’ll also have a quarterback for Kubiak to develop if they select Fernando Mendoza, and in the NFL, that combination equals hope. The Raiders still finished behind the Cleveland Browns, Tennessee Titans and New York Giants in this ranking, but the basic logic here does make some sense if you squint a lot.