the last image of Josh McDaniels as an NFL head coach will be from Monday night. Las Vegas Raiders receiver Davante Adams had gotten himself open for two long touchdowns in the second half against the Lions, only for hand-picked McDaniels favorite Jimmy Garoppolo to misfire on both his throws.
The first, under heavy pressure from Aidan Hutchinson, landed 2 yards out of bounds. The second landed 2 yards past Adams’ fingertips. The star wideout went to the sideline, slammed his helmet on the bench and very visibly said he was tired of something I’ll summate as the Raiders experience.
Fast-forward to 24 hours later, and it turned out that Mark Davis was tired of that experience, too. The Raiders owner stunningly fired McDaniels and general manager Dave Ziegler on Tuesday night, ending the former Patriots coordinator’s head-coaching gig after 25 games, less than two seasons into a six-year contract. McDaniels went 9-16 as the Raiders’ coach, a step down from his 11-17 mark in 28 games with the Broncos (2009-10), where he was also fired halfway through his second campaign.
On the merits of their record and the season they’ve had so far, McDaniels and Ziegler did not deserve to go. They’ve been middling, sure, but plenty of coaches have done worse before improving. Davis didn’t fire Jon Gruden after he started 11-21 in his second gig with the Raiders. Kyle Shanahan was 10-22 across his first two seasons with the 49ers. Dan Campbell, who handed McDaniels his final loss, started his Lions career 4-19-1. He has gone 13-4 since then. Plenty of coaches have gotten off to slow starts and turned things around.
Instead, the case for firing McDaniels and Ziegler is more comprehensive. I’m not sure a coach and general manager have ever gotten as many of their big decisions wrong over the first two years of their tenure than the now-deposed Raiders pairing. Everyone makes mistakes, and it’s easy to use hindsight to correct calls, but many of the decisions they made looked foolish even in the moment. Running through them in chronological order gives us a brief history of the regime and why the pair is out in Las Vegas.
On the merits of their record and the season they’ve had so far, McDaniels and Ziegler did not deserve to go. They’ve been middling, sure, but plenty of coaches have done worse before improving. Davis didn’t fire Jon Gruden after he started 11-21 in his second gig with the Raiders. Kyle Shanahan was 10-22 across his first two seasons with the 49ers. Dan Campbell, who handed McDaniels his final loss, started his Lions career 4-19-1. He has gone 13-4 since then. Plenty of coaches have gotten off to slow starts and turned things around.
Instead, the case for firing McDaniels and Ziegler is more comprehensive. I’m not sure a coach and general manager have ever gotten as many of their big decisions wrong over the first two years of their tenure than the now-deposed Raiders pairing. Everyone makes mistakes, and it’s easy to use hindsight to correct calls, but many of the decisions they made looked foolish even in the moment. Running through them in chronological order gives us a brief history of the regime and why the pair is out in Las Vegas.
On the merits of their record and the season they’ve had so far, McDaniels and Ziegler did not deserve to go. They’ve been middling, sure, but plenty of coaches have done worse before improving. Davis didn’t fire Jon Gruden after he started 11-21 in his second gig with the Raiders. Kyle Shanahan was 10-22 across his first two seasons with the 49ers. Dan Campbell, who handed McDaniels his final loss, started his Lions career 4-19-1. He has gone 13-4 since then. Plenty of coaches have gotten off to slow starts and turned things around.
Instead, the case for firing McDaniels and Ziegler is more comprehensive. I’m not sure a coach and general manager have ever gotten as many of their big decisions wrong over the first two years of their tenure than the now-deposed Raiders pairing. Everyone makes mistakes, and it’s easy to use hindsight to correct calls, but many of the decisions they made looked foolish even in the moment. Running through them in chronological order gives us a brief history of the regime and why the pair is out in Las Vegas.
aking over a Raiders team that had question marks about the offensive line and just about everywhere on defense, McDaniels sent his top two picks to Green Bay to acquire … a great wide receiver. The Raiders dealt for Adams and gave him a five-year, $140 million contract, paying the superstar wideout nearly $68 million over the first three years of his new pact. The deal reset the wide receiver market, although Tyreek Hill topped it when the Chiefs sent him to the Dolphins eight days later.
When I wrote about the trade, I went through the assumptions the Raiders were making in doing the deal and why they didn’t add up. The most important ones were about self-scouting, Adams’ development and the Vegas time frame.
Adams was and is a great receiver, but he was turning 30 in December 2022. The track record of star wideouts as they hit 30 suggests that you cannot count on them to continue producing All-Pro caliber seasons year after year. He delivered one last year, but he’s on pace for 1,145 yards and six touchdowns this season. Those are good numbers, of course, but the Raiders gave Adams a market-resetting contract and sacrificed two valuable picks to get the right to pay Adams that deal. And while paying him close to $23 million per season is a lot, giving up another $10 million or so per year in surplus value from the lost draft picks made Adams overwhelmingly expensive. He would have to be the best receiver in football every season to justify that pact, and that’s too difficult for any non-Jerry Rice receiver to do in their 30s.
Trading for Adams added a star to the Vegas roster, but even a great wide receiver can’t single-handedly swing a team into contention when Patrick Mahomes is in the same division. The Raiders weren’t as good as their record and were stuck behind teams with significantly better quarterbacks in a stacked AFC. The other moves in the AFC West race failed, too — Mack had a quiet year, Jackson got hurt and Wilson was a disaster — but adding Adams was never going to keep the Raiders in the hunt with the best teams in the conference, even if he had the sort of season we saw in 2022.
The big-picture problem, though, is that McDaniels and Ziegler didn’t recognize how eroded the roster was after years of poor decisions. The Raiders desperately needed to add young, cost-controlled talent to their roster as opposed to relying on veteran imports and short-term fixes. If anything, Ziegler should have been trying to acquire more picks. Instead, he traded his top two selections for a 29-year-old wide receiver. Whether it was delusion or naivete, McDaniels and Ziegler were foolishly aggressive.
March 16, 2022: The Raiders sign Chandler Jones to a three-year, $51 million contract.
Well, this technically happened two days before, but it goes right alongside the Adams deal. One of the few things the Raiders did not need on defense was edge rushing help, given that one of their few budding stars was Maxx Crosby. Yannick Ngakoue, signed the year before, was under contract on the other side of the line.
No team can have too many pass-rushers, but with limited resources and a roster crying out for young talent and depth, the Raiders signed a 32-year-old edge rusher to a massive deal. Vegas then traded Ngakoue to the Colts for cornerback Rock Ya-Sin, who had been benched for stretches in Indy. Ya-Sin started nine games last season before leaving in free agency.
Jones proceeded to become one of the worst free agent signings in recent league history. He mustered only 4.5 sacks in his first season with the team, and his relationship with the Raiders broke down this summer. The Raiders paid Jones $33 million for one season before releasing the longtime Patriot. McDaniels couldn’t have anticipated the move would go as poorly as it did, but again: The Raiders were not a 32-year-old pass-rusher away from being a Super Bowl contender.
April 13, 2022: The Raiders sign Carr to a three-year, $121.5 million extension.
Extension should be in quote marks here. While McDaniels publicly suggested that Carr would be their quarterback for “this season and beyond,” anyone who had the ability to read an NFL contract could see through that statement. Carr’s deal had just $5.1 million in actual guarantees. The Raiders had paid Carr that $5.1 million and given him a no-trade clause for the option of paying him $33 million in 2023 and the first $7.5 million of his deal for 2024. It wasn’t the last time McDaniels would be deliberately misleading about the status of his quarterback.
Of course, despite McDaniels’ claims and the gaudy “extension,” he quickly fell out of love with Carr. By the end of December, McDaniels benched his quarterback to avoid an injury that would trigger his extension. Carr, who had repeatedly expressed his desire to stay with the Raiders, left the team before the end of the season. When McDaniels tried to trade him after the season, the quarterback invoked his no-trade clause, forcing the Raiders to release Carr without any compensation.
April 28-30, 2022: The Raiders get little out of the 2022 draft.
It’s admittedly going to be tough to land starters when you trade away your top two picks, but the Raiders still can’t feel great about the players they landed in April 2022. Ziegler and McDaniels came from New England, where Bill Belichick has made a cottage industry out of moving down and grabbing extra selections.
While the Raiders did make a couple of small trades down, they also moved up twice in the fourth round. First, they grabbed running back Zamir White, who has barely seen the field behind Josh Jacobs. Then they traded a pair of fifth-round picks for defensive tackle Neil Farrell, who lasted one season before being traded to the Chiefs for a future sixth-rounder.
The only starter they appear to have landed is offensive lineman Dylan Parham, who moved around the line last season and struggled in pass protection (though he was solid as a run-blocker). Seventh-round pick Thayer Munford has settled in as a backup lineman, but this isn’t a great haul for a team that desperately needed youth to build around.
April 29, 2022: The Raiders decline Jacobs’ fifth-year option.
With a trio of fifth-year option decisions coming for the infamous draft class of 2019, McDaniels and Ziegler declined across the board. They passed up fifth-year guarantees for Clelin Ferrell, Johnathan Abram and Jacobs, all of whom had failed to impress after being drafted by Gruden. Abram was gone by midseason, while Ferrell left the team after an anonymous year and signed with the 49ers.
Jacobs, of course, took a circuitous path to stardom. The Raiders played Jacobs with their third-stringers in the Hall of Fame Game, an ignominious task for a player who had been the team’s starting running back for three seasons. If McDaniels was attempting to motivate him, it worked; Jacobs responded with the best season of his career, leading the league in rushing yards and being named a first-team All-Pro. He is the best on-field success story of the McDaniels era.
On the other hand, declining the option meant that the Raiders then had to use the franchise tag to keep Jacobs around for 2023. An upset Jacobs then refused to sign the tag until the Raiders gave him a restructured one-year deal at the end of August, keeping him out of training camp. Since then, he has been one of the worst backs in football this season, struggling to create the big plays we saw during his breakout 2022 season. In the end, even something that seemed like a success for McDaniels turned out to be a failure.
June 10, 2022: Hunter Renfrow signs a two-year, $32 million extension.
If there was ever an obvious fit of player and coach, it appeared to be Renfrow and McDaniels. The Patriots coordinator had built offenses catering to the talents of shifty slot receivers like Wes Welker, Danny Amendola and Julian Edelman. Renfrow was coming off of a career year in 2021, having established himself as a viable third-down and red zone target. With Adams and Darren Waller in the mix, Renfrow felt like one of the best third options in football.
But it has been all downhill since. Renfrow struggled with injuries in 2022 and finished with 330 receiving yards in 10 games, often while playing behind Mack Hollins on the wide receiver depth chart. In 2023, McDaniels has barely used Renfrow, playing him on about 38% of the offensive snaps. He has yet to top 25 yards in a game this season, and the Raiders didn’t move their 27-year-old wideout on at the trade deadline.McDaniels seemed to solidify his receiving corps by inking his veteran tight end to a new deal. While the Raiders reportedly turned down attempts from Green Bay to insert Waller into the Adams deal (and further attempts to acquire the tight end at the trade deadline), Waller was three days from turning 30 and was coming off an injury-plagued season. McDaniels seemed to be signaling that he was building around Adams, Renfrow and Waller as his big three.
Waller battled injuries again, but he managed only 388 receiving yards in nine games in 2022. After the season, the Raiders shipped Waller off to the Giants for a late-third-round pick. While the Giants picked up the vast majority of Waller’s extension, the Raiders essentially paid about $4.5 million for the right to trade Waller for less draft capital than they would have netted (or saved) in their dealings with the Packers..
In the 2022 edition of my annual column on the teams most likely to decline, the Raiders were an obvious pick. Their record in close games was unsustainable; the incredible fourth-quarter work of kicker Daniel Carlson would be hard to repeat; and their roster wasn’t very good (even after the additions of Adams and Jones).
The Raiders dropped from 10-7 to 6-11, and they fell from 7-2 in one-score games to 4-9 in those same contests, including narrow losses in each of their first three games. They lost in vicious ways. McDaniels’ team blew a 20-0 halftime lead over the Cardinals, gave up a fourth-down conversion and a 2-pointer to Kyler Murray to send the game to overtime, and then lost the game when a Renfrow fumble went to the house. Arizona went 3-12 the rest of the way.
There was more. They lost to the Titans when a game-tying 2-pointer failed. They lost to the Chiefs when a 2-pointer to take the lead failed. They lost 25-20 to the Colts in Jeff Saturday’s first and only win as a coach, famously allowing a 39-yard scramble to Matt Ryan when he ran past Ya-Sin. They lost 17-16 to the Rams in Baker Mayfield’s debut, when he was playing behind third-string linemen and barely knew the playbook.
You can’t even say that the Raiders were blindingly unlucky. They won a game against the Patriots where they converted a fourth-and-10 to extend the game, marched down the field and scored — and then were gifted a game-winning fumble recovery for a touchdown when Jakobi Meyers had a brain freeze and threw the ball to Jones. The Raiders were so impressed that they signed Meyers to a contract in free agency the next year. They won overtime games over the Broncos and Seahawks with late comebacks in the fourth quarter to force an extra period.
In all, Las Vegas had a total of two wins over teams with winning records in McDaniels’ year and a half at the helm.
When the Raiders moved on from Carr, their next move seemed clear. With Garoppolo leaving the 49ers after the ascension of Brock Purdy, a reunion between the former Patriots offensive coordinator and backup quarterback was too obvious to ignore. The move quickly came together, as Garoppolo was said to sign a three-year, $72.8 million deal with $45 million in guarantees.
There was only one problem: Garoppolo couldn’t pass a physical. Vegas’ oft-injured new quarterback failed his physical because of a broken foot, something McDaniels and the Raiders decided against mentioning when they announced the deal in March. Garoppolo had surgery after signing the deal, and the Raiders had Garoppolo sign a waiver allowing them to cut their new quarterback if he was unable to pass a physical. The Raiders sent reporters home from an initial news conference to announce the signing before calling them back the next day, presumably while negotiating over what they found in Garoppolo’s foot.
Whether it’s rust from missing time with the foot injury or a product of not playing in the quarterback-friendly 49ers offense, Garoppolo has been a mess this season. He has already missed time with a concussion and a back injury, and when he has been on the field, Garoppolo has thrown a league-high nine interceptions on just 168 pass attempts. After torching his relationship with the organization’s long-term starter to bring in his old friend, McDaniels has managed to coax only a 35.2 QBR out of Garoppolo this season. That ranks 31st out of 32 starting quarterbacks.
