Raider Nation is desensitized to disappointment. No team has had fewer winning seasons over the last 23 years than the Raiders' two (2016, 2021). Only the Dolphins (24 seasons) have a longer active drought without a playoff win than the Silver and Black (22 years). And no team has cycled through more head coaches this century—15 since 2000, including eight since Mark Davis took over the team following his father’s death in 2011.
The problem isn't that the 2025 Raiders have hit rock bottom—they are 2-9 with a porous roster and no long-term answers at coach or quarterback—or that this point is any lower than the team has sunk in recent years. It’s that rock bottom has become inevitable.
The latest disaster of a season reached its embarrassing crescendo Sunday with a 24-10 loss to the Cleveland Browns, who were quarterbacked by fifth-round pick rookie quarterback Shedeur Sanders in his first career start. Cleveland built an insurmountable lead after a few splash plays early on; Las Vegas’s offense couldn’t move the ball until the game was already out of hand, and quarterback Geno Smith was sacked 10 (!) times. It was worse than any of the blowouts this season, including the 31-0 loss to Kansas City when the Raiders ran just 30 offensive plays, and the 40-6 drubbing in Indianapolis. And it was arguably worse than when the Raiders lost in 2022 to Jeff Saturday’s Colts in his first game ever as a coach, or when Baker Mayfield led the Rams to a win over the Raiders on Thursday Night Football after being in Los Angeles for just 48 hours. Rock bottom has taken many forms.
In this most recent case, the home crowd booed. Smith flipped off fans as he left the field. And hours after the game, head coach Pete Carroll fired offensive coordinator Chip Kelly, the second coordinator Carroll dismissed in the past three weeks; special teams coordinator Tom McMahon was let go following a 10-7 loss to the Broncos earlier this month.
Kelly wasn’t doing enough to justify being the highest-paid coordinator in the league, but he was also dealt an impossible hand. Carroll scapegoating Kelly isn't going to fix Smith or the offense. Smith—who was Carroll’s quarterback in his twilight years in Seattle, and who the Raiders traded for and gave a new contract to before the season—has completely bottomed out. The offensive line is injury-plagued and talent-bereft, and the skill group has drastically underperformed. Kelly had new problems to solve every week and no easy answers on the roster.
Smith threw nine interceptions in his first five games this season, forcing Kelly to be more conservative and scale back the downfield passing attack for both his struggling quarterback and woeful offensive line. Getting the ball out quickly and leaning on his pass catchers to make plays didn't exactly work either. Tight end Brock Bowers played hurt for three games (Weeks 2-4) and missed another three entirely (Weeks 5-7). Left tackle Kolton Miller, far and away the best offensive lineman on the team, has been on IR since Week 4. Right guard Jackson Powers-Johnson and tight end Michael Mayer have also missed time due to injury, and the team traded away its best receiver, Jakobi Meyers, after Week 9. Kelly was never going to fix this mess, and neither is no. 6 overall pick Ashton Jeanty.
The rookie running back has flashed legitimate tackle-breaking ability on a handful of highlight-reel runs, but he hasn't been the game-wrecker the Raiders needed to mask their offensive line issues or justify spending premium draft capital to acquire him. Jeanty has been inconsistent at identifying open rushing lanes and picking up blitzers in pass protection. It's perhaps unfair to evaluate Jeanty given how little room he's had to run—he's averaging just 0.54 yards before first contact per attempt, third-lowest in the league among backs with 100-plus carries—and how often the Raiders are forced into obvious passing situations while trailing by multiple scores.
But that's also part of the problem. The Raiders were either overconfident or delusional about how Smith would play and the state of their offensive line to think adding Jeanty would push the offense over the top. Jeanty, like Saquon Barkley was for the Eagles last year, could be a force multiplier when the offensive line is elite and there are other weapons around him. In Las Vegas, he's largely a non-factor because the rest of the offense is a trainwreck. Yet, somehow the rest of the Raiders rookie class has been even more disappointing. Second- and fourth-round receivers Jack Bech and Dont’e Thornton have 15 combined catches all season. The two offensive linemen (Caleb Rogers and Charles Grant) drafted in the third round have barely seen the field, and third-round cornerback Darien Porter has been a rotational player with 2023 fifth-rounder Kyu Blu Kelly (who is on his fifth team in three years). The Raiders have glaring holes at receiver, offensive line, and cornerback—the exact positions where they spent top-100 picks last April. Yet none of those rookies outside of Jeanty can consistently see the field.
It's either a gross misevaluation from first-year GM John Spytek and the front office, or a misalignment with Carroll about the type of players he wants. But this very much feels like Carroll’s mess. Carroll wanted Smith. Carroll wanted 33-year-old receiver Tyler Lockett, a longtime Seahawk in Carroll’s good ol’ days, who he signed in the middle of the season and started over Bech and Thornton. Carroll wanted Chip Kelly and gave him “a lot of leeway” to call the offense. Carroll promised a competitive team and a disciplined culture, yet he’s delivered anything but. The Raiders have the same losing culture under Pete that they had under Antonio Pierce and Josh McDaniels.
So where do the Raiders go from here? The relationship between Spytek and hands-on minority owner Tom Brady dates back to their days at Michigan in the 1990s—it's hard to imagine they're breaking up after one failed season that they can easily blame on Carroll. Of course, there's a non-zero chance Davis and Brady don't fire Carroll in order to save face, and let the 74-year-old coach run it back with a new staff in 2026. That feels risky considering Carroll hired most of this year’s staff, including his two sons Brennan and Nathan, and almost certainly had input on the draft class, particularly the Jeanty pick.
The alternative is yet another head coaching search, where the Raiders would be pitching a roster with a mess at quarterback, bottom-of-the-barrel talent, and a complicated ownership situation, thanks to Brady’s omnipresence. Would any of the top offensive coaching candidates want to go to Las Vegas without a plan at quarterback? Probably not.
Which means the Raiders would likely have to settle for their second or third choice again, just as they did with Carroll after missing out on Ben Johnson and Liam Coen last offseason. There would be more misalignment between Spytek and the new coach. One (or both) of them would get fired the next time the team hits rock bottom and needs another fresh start. And history will repeat itself again and again, always back at rock bottom.
