It’s August in Las Vegas, which is to say it’s blazing hot, yet I find myself surrounded by folks dressed in heavy-looking spikes, silvery chains, black eye patches, mega-helmets, leather jackets, and steampunk goggles. The occasion? A preseason NFL game between the Las Vegas Raiders and the San Francisco 49ers at Allegiant Stadium, a dark spaceship of a venue that looms over the immediate area, gleaming and gloomy in equal measure.
The tailgate lots fill up with all manner of conspicuous superfans. Burly dudes dressed like nightmares pose for photos and give one another “sup” nods in passing. Some look like they wandered off the set of Mad Max: Fury Road. Others have more of a “Times Square Elmo who broke bad and moved 3,000 miles west” vibe. Some chat under an awning that says “Shark Law Motorcycle Attorneys,” while others wait for food at a massive pop-up taco emporium. There are many Niners fans in attendance, too, but their normie Brock Purdy and Christian McCaffrey jerseys only serve to enhance the spectacle that is the Raider Nation gong show around them.
I get to chatting with a man named Emilio who is taking a breather from walking around in his thicc “Raider Rock” costume; he sits in the shade with his huge headpiece next to him, and he sighs heavily when it’s time to put it back on again. Another man, Jay Jaxn, is wearing a “MAKE THE RAIDERS GREAT AGAIN” hat and a bulky jacket laden with colorful patches. Gesturing at the crowd, he tells me that to him, Raider Nation has long felt just like family.
Dressed-up Raiders fans hang out in the tailgate lots before the Raiders-49ers preseason game
“That's what we're all about,” he says. “We want the family to show up, get together, have a great time because … look at our record. We've had a bad record for 20-something years. The family is still here. That's how much we love each other.” I cluck in sympathetic agreement. After all, the first time I went on assignment to a Raiders game, I wrote that “one of the most amazing things about Raider Nation is how well it has sustained itself through some very dark days.” That was in the fall of 2012, when the team was still playing in Oakland.
In the 13 years since, the Raiders have cycled through eight head coaches, including Jack Del Rio, Jon Gruden, Josh McDaniels, and Antonio Pierce, and six general managers. Since losing in the Super Bowl back in 2003, the team has logged only two (2) postseason appearances, and they both ended in wild-card losses. Players like Khalil Mack who were supposed to be the foundation of the franchise were traded away; fun swings like reuniting Davante Adams with his old college pal Derek Carr turned into nothing but a big whiff. Longtime fans across California watched the team relocate shamelessly to Las Vegas. Last season, the Raiders went a dismal 4-13. Everything changed, only to wind up exactly the same.
Yet it’s that time of year when it’s hard not to wonder whether things can be different this season. Jay tells me that he went to a Raiders gala and got to meet the team’s newest head coach: Pete Carroll, age 73, of USC and Seattle Seahawks renown, who is one of a cohort of splashy new Raiders additions. Compared with this time last year, the franchise has a new general manager (John Spytek), offensive coordinator (Chip Kelly), starting quarterback (Geno Smith), rookie running back (Ashton Jeanty), and even minority owner (Tom Brady). And then there’s Carroll, right in the center of it all.
“We hung out,” Jay says of the new coach. “We talked. He's very talkative; he's very friendly. If you come up to him, he makes time to talk to you! I'm hoping he gives that much attention to the team.”
I ask Jay whether there was anything he made sure to tell Carroll during their brief time together. “I said: Thank you for helping our team,” he answers, sounding like someone praising a firefighter for getting a beloved family cat down from a tree. “I hope we can live up to your expectations.” Of course, one of the many burning questions surrounding the 2025 Las Vegas Raiders is what on earth the right set of expectations should be.
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Everyone says the same thing when they talk about Carroll. “I definitely respected him from afar, just seeing the energy he brought on the field,” defensive back Maxx Crosby tells reporters following a joint practice between the Raiders and 49ers. “He's got that young energy, that childlike energy,” says Alex Bachman, a practice squad receiver who grew up in Southern California and idolized Carroll’s USC Trojans. “He's super energetic,” quarterback Geno Smith tells the media. “Like, it seems like he just pops out of bed, man. He's just fired up as soon as he wakes up. And I mean, he brings the juice every single day.”
“The one thing is just how much energy he has,” says offensive coordinator Chip Kelly, 61, speaking with The Ringer following a training camp session in the middle of August. “Some people, you see ’em and they're up 90 percent of the time, but there's that 10 percent of time where, you know, maybe he's sick or he's dragging or whatever. But I've never seen him since we got here—and I got here at the end of January—when he's had a down day. He just—he’s fired up and enjoying life.”
During practices, Carroll’s bucket hat can be seen bobbing about as he jogs with players or demonstrates how to explode off the line of scrimmage. “He feels like he's one of the guys,” Crosby says. “He wants to be out on the field with us. He's wearing gloves in practice. He's flying around, running around.” Sometimes he even throws a tackle.
When a teensy skirmish threatens to break out during the joint practice with the Niners, Carroll disappears into the fray and emerges with a giant man beneath each arm. He does all this in triple-digit, bone-dry heat. It’s so hot in Vegas that I feel it from my ankles to my eyeballs, but I can’t complain because I can tell that Carroll definitely never does.
Last year was the second time in his half century of coaching that Carroll spent a season away from football. The first was in 2000, after he was let go by the New England Patriots and before he took over as head coach at USC. That first break from coaching was a formative experience: He used the time to think through his own value proposition as a football coach and his influences, ranging from Bill Russell to Jerry Garcia. (Carroll, who grew up in the Bay Area, attended a Grateful Dead show or 20 in his day.) The mission statement he came up with was ALWAYS COMPETE, and boy, did he ever. By the time he was fired by the Seahawks following the 2023 season, Carroll had a pair of back-to-back national championships with USC and a Super Bowl win with Seattle under his belt.
When he was presented with the opportunity to turn the Raiders’ ship around—no, for real this time!—it was too tempting a challenge for Carroll to pass up. By his chipper math, which checks out if you squint hard enough and carry the one, Carroll has posted 10 wins a season for a couple of decades now. Which means that theoretically, all he has to do is be average for the Raiders to become pretty good.
New Vegas GM John Spytek had never met Carroll before they were hired by the team just a few days apart. But once they spoke by phone, he knew that they were simpatico when it came to their vision for the roster: one populated by guys who never stop following the ball and who always finish their blocks. “It might be the one last block that the running back needs to score, right?” says Spytek. He and I are sitting in the bleachers following a Wednesday morning practice, and the rookie GM—whom Carroll refers to as “Johnny”—tells me about working with the veteran head coach.
“We're aligned in that, if you are going to make this team or have a chance at making this team,” Spytek says, “you better be (a) either just a killer from a competition standpoint or (b) kind of malleable to the point where it's like, Hey, now I see what it takes. Because I think one of the cool things I've learned from Pete is, and you can see this throughout his career, is he'll give those guys a chance.”
As we talk, Spytek notices some players who are still out on the field getting in a few extra reps. In a way, they represent a little bit of Column A and a little bit of Column B. One of them, Kolton Miller, is a 6-foot-8 offensive lineman who was drafted by the Raiders in 2018, which means that he has played for going on five different head coaches. The other, Laki Tasi, is a 6-foot-6 Samoan Australian rugby player who only just took up American football, thanks to the NFL’s International Player Pathway program, and who had never even heard of the name Pete Carroll this time last year. On both counts, Tasi has been a quick study: He made the Raiders practice squad, and he also made friends with Carroll, whom he refers to as a second dad. “Meeting him in person,” Tasi tells reporters, “I was like, Man, this guy has an aura.”
Even though Carroll wasn’t on the Seahawks sideline last season, he and his aura remained front of mind for quarterback Geno Smith, 34, who started playing for him in 2020. “He was right there for me, anything I needed,” Smith tells me during training camp, still wearing his red quarterback jersey from practice. “He’s always given me compliments after my good games. I had a moment where things weren’t going so well, and I needed someone to talk to, and he was there for me then.”
I ask Smith whether he ever heard Carroll’s voice in his head during games last season. His answer is yes—sort of. It wasn’t so much something Carroll said that stuck with Smith as it was a gesture that Carroll once did.
It was late October 2022, in a game against the Chargers, and Smith was starting to spiral: yelling at the refs, stomping around, things of that nature. Carroll got his attention, then ran his hand down the front of his chest as if to say: Exhale. Relax. Chill. “I was kind of getting a little fired up,” Smith says with a smile, mimicking the motion himself. “He calmed me down. And so I always think about that moment, ’cause that’s something that Coach does a great job at. And when he wasn’t there with me, I had to do it myself. I would always think about: Pete would want me to stay calm.”
Way before Carroll came into the picture, Smith’s first football coach was his uncle Antoine. As a kid in Miramar, Florida, Smith watched football on TV with his grandma and played the sport in the park with his uncle, who taught him everything: how to throw, how to catch, how to run routes. Smith was a tween when he decided once and for all that he didn’t want to play any position other than quarterback. His rationale, as he tells it, was age-appropriately self-involved. “I was about 12 years old—10, 11, 12,” Smith says. “I decided quarterback was the best position for me because the quarterback always gets the ball.”
Eventually, Smith became one of the biggest QB prospects to come out of South Florida. He wore no. 12 in homage to the NFL’s most dominant quarterback, Brady. He excelled at West Virginia and was drafted in 2013 by the New York Jets in the second round. He started all 16 games his rookie season and won half of them—a record that the Jets have eclipsed only once in the decade-plus since. But then Smith broke his jaw in an infamous 2015 locker room fight. And then he tore his ACL in a 2016 game. By the time Smith recovered, he was no longer a New York Jet. In the seasons that followed, Smith was demoted to the role of backup quarterback—you know, the one who pretty much never gets the ball.
First, he backed up Eli Manning. (When the Giants decided to bench Manning and end his streak of 210 straight starts in 2017, it was Smith who got the look—and the ire of fans.) Next, he backed up Philip Rivers on the Chargers. After that, he went to Seattle and backed up Russell Wilson. From 2015 to 2021, Smith saw time in just 15 games and threw for nine total touchdowns.
Then came 2022. The Seahawks decided to part ways with Wilson, Smith beat out Drew Lock for the starting job, and by the end of the season, he had started all 17 games, thrown 30 touchdown passes, and led the league with a completion rate just shy of 70 percent. He made the Pro Bowl and was named Comeback Player of the Year for his efforts. And he’s been playing at pretty much the same level ever since. “I’ve grown a lot,” Smith says. “The game is a lot slower for me. Gained a ton more knowledge, but I’m still growing and still evolving, still looking to get better.” And now he’s doing that in Las Vegas, after he was traded to the Raiders in March for the 92nd pick in the 2025 draft. He signed a two-year, $75 million extension with the team in April.
“A lot of guys may have just said: Hey, I’m not gonna make it, maybe I should just move on to something else,” Kelly tells me. “But that’s not Geno. When you talk to Geno, he wants to play 10 more years.” Kelly brags that he’s “always been a big fan of Geno,” and he’s telling the truth: Once upon a time, he even tried to recruit Smith to play for him at Oregon. Instead, “he had a tremendous career at West Virginia,” Kelly says, “and was throwing the ball all over the place.” In the 2012 Orange Bowl, for example, Smith threw for six touchdowns. “I think he broke Tom Brady's [Orange Bowl] record,” Kelly says, “which is ironic, because Tom's our owner now. One of our owners now.”
In March of 2023, Brady acquired a minority stake in the Las Vegas Aces, the WNBA franchise that had been purchased by Raiders principal owner Mark Davis in 2021 and had just won its first of back-to-back titles. A few years earlier, when Brady was leaving New England, Davis’s Raiders had been one of the teams rumored to be interested in signing him as quarterback before then–head coach Gruden reportedly put the kibosh on the idea. Still, Brady and Davis had stayed in touch, and last fall, a year and a half after Brady invested in the Aces, the former quarterback and one of his business partners bought a combined 10-ish percent stake in the Raiders, too.
It wasn’t an entirely smooth transaction. Brady was criticized for having a conflict of interest between his new gig as a Fox color commentator and his position as a minority owner of the team, a tension that the NFL recently took steps to defuse. Yet the controversy hasn’t exactly caused Brady to shy away from associating publicly with his new team. Quite the opposite! Brady’s longtime health guru Alex Guerrero is now employed full-time by Vegas, for example. Spytek chats with Guerrero daily, and Smith is in constant touch with him, too. And Brady himself is present at the preseason game between the Raiders and 49ers, seen arriving at Allegiant Stadium in a shiny white custom Raiders jacket, slim black pants, and dark sunglasses, looking like Elvis or Al Davis. With this commitment to the bit, he could have blended in really nicely at the tailgates.
As I stroll into Allegiant myself around the same time, I notice that while the venue has little in common aesthetically with the Coliseum, the Raiders’ former dump in Oakland, the two places sure sound alike. That’s because every 45 seconds or so, someone starts the Chant, a call-and-response that goes like this:
rrrrRRRRRAAAAAAAAIIIIIII-DDDDEEERRRRRRRSSSSsss!
… and is delivered in that same minor-key tone that hockey fans use to taunt an opposing goalie. Except that in this case, the opposing goalie is their own beloved team, and the mood isn’t meant to be sneering. It’s more like a desperate, hopeful howl at the moon.
With Brady looking on, the preseason game is weird in the same way all preseason games are, with the best players receiving limited minutes and the play callers not wanting to give too many things away. (Also, there are a lot of Niners fans in the crowd.) San Francisco wins by three, but there’s plenty to like about the Raiders. Smith looks capable and confident. Safety Jeremy Chinn, who is new to the team, hauls in an interception. And the Raiders’ two most recent first-round draft picks turn in highlight-reel performances.
Explosive tight end Brock Bowers uses every inch of his 6-foot-4 frame to snag a 28-yard pass, demonstrating exactly why he earned first-team All-Pro honors last season. And at the other end of the height spectrum, the 5-foot-8 Jeanty, a player once described as “a rolling ball of knives,” has a breakout run that winds up going viral.
“If you pick me, it’s simple,” Jeanty wrote in an open letter to NFL GMs ahead of the draft this spring. “I’m coming to your franchise to do what Saquon and the Eagles just did.” With expectations like that, his first preseason game earlier in August, a 23-23 tie with Seattle, had been something of a dud. But in the locker room following the August Niners game, a reporter asks Jeanty whether he has now arrived, and he beams.
A few days later, Jeanty is asked about the popularity of the video clip from his performance in Saturday’s game. “Thought it was pretty cool,” he says, “but I guess people didn't think I could do it on the NFL level. So I guess it was cool, but I've been doing that, so it's not really anything crazy to me.”
The guy tasked with helping Bowers and Jeanty earn more highlight-reel clips is Kelly, who became the highest-paid coordinator in the NFL this winter when the Raiders hired him for a reported $6 million a year. (According to Kelly at the time, Brady “kind of represented the ownership” in their recruitment efforts.)
Kelly rose to national prominence in four groundbreaking seasons (2009-12) as the head coach at Oregon, where his offensive fireworks earned him the nickname “Big Balls Chip.” But subsequent NFL coaching stints were comparatively underwhelming, as Kelly clashed with management in Philadelphia and went 2-14 in one season in San Francisco. He returned to the college level in 2018 to coach UCLA, but it wasn’t until he was preparing for a bowl game at the end of the 2023 season that he had a minor awakening. The team’s quarterback coach had been hired away, and Kelly took over his duties in advance of the game. He loved the focus and nitty-gritty football details involved in the work; his wife remarked that she had never seen him so happy. Kelly decided to leave UCLA to take a job as offensive coordinator at Ohio State in 2024. (Ohio State’s head coach, Ryan Day, was one of the first quarterbacks Kelly had coached at the University of New Hampshire in the ’90s.)
“As a head coach, you get disconnected from the players a lot, ’cause you have all the head coaching duties you have to do, the CEO-type stuff,” Kelly tells me. “So when that opportunity presented itself, it was like, all right, maybe that's something at this point in my career I’d like to try. You never know what the future holds. I didn't know that going to Ohio State would give me an opportunity here or any of that. It was just: Are you happy on a daily basis?” Ultimately, Kelly’s decision wound up making a whole lot of people happy (and a lot of people miserable): During his year as the Buckeyes offensive coordinator, Ohio State won the BCS title for the first time in a decade. Smith’s cousin Jeremiah was one of the players on the roster.
I ask Smith whether he’s still the same player that Kelly tried to recruit all those years ago. “I would hope so,” he says. “I know that Chip likes mobile guys. He likes guys that can extend plays. Very smart quarterbacks—cerebral guys. And guys who are accurate and have strong arms. So hopefully that's me.” Recently, Kelly gave Smith a book to read, and for the life of him he can’t remember the name of it, but “it was a really great read” about leadership, Smith says.
Kelly tells me that it was a book by Jon Gordon, but later, when I look him up, I see that Gordon has written quite a number of books about leadership. He also has a website called Daily Positive and a podcast on which he once interviewed Kelly. “How important is culture to you, and how would you define culture, Chip?” Gordon asked on the pod. “Um, I like the word environment better,” Kelly said. “I think sometimes culture is thrown around, but I think it's our job as coaches to create an environment where our players have an opportunity to be successful and then get out of their way and let them go do it. I don't think you can be a helicopter coach. You know?”
Sometimes the Raiders can seem like a helicopter franchise: always hovering, always making sure everyone is sufficiently familiar with their insular culture and lore. But the latest administration has also come equipped with plenty of mantras and reading material from the wider world.
Carroll’s influences famously range from tennis gurus to jam band frontmen. Kelly likes to tell a maybe apocryphal story about John Lennon. Smith occasionally contemplates Socrates. “I think about, you know, like his influence over Plato and all the other great philosophers of the Greek times,” Smith says. “I mean, there's so many great philosophers in this world who've been here, but the thing that compelled me with [Socrates] was that, you know, he never wrote down any of his ideologies. Instead, he pretty much told them to people and then let the people pass it along.” To Smith, this is a good framework for how he wants to lead: He works on throwing the ball and lets everyone else spread the word.
And Spytek, in the midst of describing Brady, paraphrases an anecdote about Mark Spitz from the book Grit by Angela Duckworth. When I look that up later, I see that the passage in question quotes heavily from Nietzsche, too, with lines like: “No one can see in the work of the artist how it has become.”
Spytek and Brady go back even further than Smith and Kelly. The two men were both student-athletes at Michigan at the turn of the millennium: Spytek contributed to the football program’s scout team and special teams, while Brady, who was a few years ahead of him, was the Wolverines’ starting quarterback. About a decade later, they met again on the sideline of a 2010 Patriots football game, where they shot the shit about Michigan football for all of 10 seconds. Another 10 years would go by until the next time they crossed paths: when Brady decided to sign with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the spring of 2020.
Since graduating from Michigan, Spytek had been working his way up the NFL off-field ladder. His first role, which earned him $250 weekly, was being a Detroit Lions gofer; his tasks included a lot of running up and down stairs and shepherding hard drives from one Lions employee to another. Later, he worked as a scout for the Eagles, Browns, and Broncos, where he was part of the Super Bowl 50–winning team in 2015. The following season, he went to Tampa to work under GM Jason Licht, with whom he’d been colleagues in Philly.
It was Spytek who first shared with Licht the silly (unless …?) notion that maybe Brady could be a fit with the Bucs. And when that somehow happened, it wasn’t long before Spytek was tasked with prepping Brady on the opposing defense each week—a role that ultimately earned him the quarterback’s trust and respect. When the Buccaneers won the Super Bowl in 2021, Brady found Spytek in the stadium tunnel for a hug. “It was like, Well, that’s pretty fucking cool,” Spytek says.
When Spytek was the assistant GM in Tampa with ambitions for more, Licht used to tell him: Be careful what you wish for. “There’s gonna be a day,” Spytek says, quoting his mentor, “where you just wish everyone would leave you alone to watch tape.” A few months into his new role, he’s starting to understand. “I call him every once in a while,” Spytek jokes, “and I’m like: I want my old job back!”
For all the good vibes and cool opportunities and great book recs to be found in and around the new-look Raiders, though, this is still NFL football—which means that there will be disgruntled players, season-altering injuries, and philosophical divides week in and week out. In late July, Christian Wilkins, the player who I remember once thinking would definitely turn the Raiders’ fortunes around, parted ways with the team. In the Raiders’ third preseason game, backup quarterback Aidan O’Connell was wiped right off the depth chart because of a fractured wrist. Wide receiver Jakobi Meyers has announced that he wishes to be traded. Former Raiders draft pick Amari Cooper returned to Vegas in a nice full-circle moment, but it was hard not to wonder whether this means that the team isn’t happy with the progression of younger guys like rookie Dont’e Thornton. And what about the pass defense: Can it be trusted? Will this wind up feeling like Carroll’s first year in Seattle, when the team made 284 roster transactions in one season?
What’s more, Carroll’s AFC West counterparts (Jim Harbaugh, Andy Reid, and Sean Payton) are no slouches. And the team’s opening game, which will be played thousands of miles away in New England (where Carroll once coached and where McDaniels—a failed Raiders coach—is the current offensive coordinator), has all the makings of what could become a real discourse-establishing Week 1 stinker. “If you’re going to be any good, you got to beat the best teams,” Carroll told reporters in August. As a wise man once said: Always compete.
The day after the Raiders-49ers preseason game, I attend a Backstreet Boys concert at my old friend Sphere. The crowd strikes me as almost precisely the opposite of the one at the Raiders game, both because of the sheer number of women and because, at the request of the Backstreet Boys themselves, the majority of the ticket holders are dressed in white.
Thousands of fans dressed in white attend the Backstreet Boys concert at Sphere
But somewhere in between the songs “The Perfect Fan” and “Quit Playing Games (With My Heart),” I wonder whether maybe boy band fans and Raider Nation aren’t really so different after all. Everyone just wants to capture that old magic they last felt around the turn of the millennium. Everyone just wants to yell something—maybe it’s “I want it that way,” maybe it’s “rrrrRRRRRAAAAAAAAIIIIIII-DDDDEEERRRRRRRSSSSsss!”—in unison, at the top of their lungs.
“The great Al Davis,” says Kelly, “said, ‘In this league, you’re going to have to win different ways every week.’ No week is the same in this league. There’s going to be weeks where it’s going to be a knock-down, drag-out 13-10 game, and then there’s going to be another game that’s gonna be a shoot-out.” So what’s his vision for this Raiders group? “Very simple: Just win, baby!” says Kelly, not totally answering the question, but still definitely playing the hits.
