Remember the great NFL Conspiracy Theory of 2025, in which Tom Brady was helping the Las Vegas Raiders, a team he had recently purchased 5 percent of, cheat by sending along confidential broadcast meeting info to offensive coordinator Chip Kelly and the rest of the coaching staff? The same Chip Kelly who was calling plays that hadn’t been installed yet, who was then fired after less than a year in November, a month before head coach Pete Carroll was fired after one single year?
Some conspiracy that was. Apart from being almost certainly fictitious, the conspiracy yielded quite literally one of the worst individual seasons in recent NFL memory, with meaningless wins over the Patriots and Chiefs bookending a campaign that saw only a single victory over the fellow dreg Titans on their way to the No. 1 overall pick and the third total franchise reset in three years.
I would challenge anyone to figure out a way this could have gone worse. Not satisfied with losing season after losing season, Marc Davis has now managed to hire and fire so many coaches in a six-year period that, pending the hiring of whatever poor sod will be next to the slaughterhouse of the Raiders’ head coaching vacancy, they will be paying five human beings to be head coach despite only employing one. Geno Smith will make $66 million in guaranteed cash to accomplish exactly nothing for the franchise, and they are no closer to achieving … anything since the Derek Carr “era” (in which they went a measly 0-2 in playoff games) ended in 2022.
The Raiders have institutionalized incompetence and impatience to such a degree that I wonder what level of Tom Brady-led conspiracy would be required to pull this franchise out of the gutter.
There is no question who the most pathetic franchise of the last 15 years is; it’s the New York Jets, and there isn’t an argument to the contrary. They have a playoff drought nearly twice as long as the next closest competitor, and they last appeared in the postseason in 2010. But for the Jets, their failure often accompanied tragedy and bad luck, and a promising rebuild with players like Garrett Wilson, Breece Hall, Sauce Gardner and Quinnen Williams was destroyed root and branch by one of the all-time greatest draft whiffs at quarterback: you cannot recover from selecting Zach Wilson second overall. Aaron Rodgers then tore his Achilles four plays into his Jets career, and now they stand poised to start a brand new rebuild for the 98th time in 15 years. It’s a cruel world.
But the Raiders are not suffering from bad luck or massive draft whiffs. They have not selected a quarterback in the first three rounds of the NFL draft since 2014 (Derek Carr himself), opting instead to replace him with aging veterans like Jimmy Garoppolo and Geno Smith they hope can pull off some off-brand Brady-to-Tampa act and push their solid roster over the top.
And it is a solid roster, with good players at every level other than the offensive line. Maxx Crosby, who the team may now be forced to trade, is one of the single best defensive players in the NFL, and Brock Bowers is certainly the most explosive tight end in football when healthy. Ashton Jeanty was one of the highest-touted running backs coming out of the draft ever and looked great in his first year when he could get past the line of scrimmage, and Jakobi Meyers, who may have seen the writing on the wall earlier, was traded to Jacksonville and basically became the number one receiver on a 13-win team overnight.
It is thus a special kind of failure the Raiders are subjecting their fans to: failure of the worst kind, one that is not simply bad but also looks and feels bad, brought about by total organizational impatience that, when expanded over five entire seasons, is no longer about a “win now” mindset. Davis has shown a complete refusal to accept a losing season from a head coach, removing Josh McDaniels, Antonio Pierce, and now Pete Carroll after effectively one season each.
Maybe they were the problem, but if you keep ghosting people after the third date for three entire years, and those dates are also accruing hundreds of millions of dollars in meaningless spending, it might be time to look in the mirror. The Raiders have no organizational philosophy because no such philosophy has been allowed to develop, with a “win or you’re gone” attitude extended to both coach and quarterback without second thought.
McDaniels and Garoppolo, Pierce and O’Connell, Carroll and Smith; none of these partnerships were going to win the Raiders a Super Bowl, and Davis was not wrong to see this season as evidence that Carroll may be well past his prime and Smith had likewise jumped the quarterbacking shark. But when three consecutive administrations are brought in and dismissed with the same takeaway, it suggests a lack of rigor in the process that hired them in the first place.
Lots of things — loose lips, icebergs, unrestricted submarine warfare — sink ships, but impulsive commitments of hundreds of millions of dollars to people who clearly cannot do the job they need to do have fully sunk this one. The only credit the Raiders can get for this year is a positively seminal work on tanking, using injured reserve, quarterback switches and in-season coach firings to ensure they didn’t win a single extra game over expectation. And with the first pick in the draft, they will almost certainly select Fernando Mendoza out of Indiana as their next franchise quarterback. Perhaps such a high pick will force a multiyear commitment, but the chaos of the organization may also ruin Mendoza’s career before it starts. Whoever they bring in the door better remake the living room, or the Jets might have a new rival for the true laughing stock of the league.
