NFL Open Thread: Just lose, baby

This year’s Black Friday game featured yet another Chiefs game that ended in the opposition committing a massive unforced blunder at the end of the game to lose a game they should have won. As a wag on Bluesky I can’t find observed, the Chiefs remain a very good team but they also seem to be playing the Bears every week, and as much rope as Reid and Mahomes have earned at some point you have to think the clock is going to strike midnight. Or maybe not — I still wouldn’t feel comfortable betting against them in the playoffs.

The Raiders being perhaps the bleakest franchise in the NFL with Bryce Young showing some wispy signs of competence reminds be that Tainier’s Raiders tank watch was very good:

Davis is Fredo Corleone, but with the fashion sense of a Russian mobster from a CBS crime procedural. In an NFL dominated by alpha males, Davis is an epsilon who wears his failson status on the sleeve of his romper pajamas Humpty Dumpty costume off-white tracksuit. 

Everything about Davis’ public demeanor suggests that he spends his days in a penthouse rage-crying at the portrait of his father above the mantle of a fake fireplace before finally hurling a scotch bottle at it so feebly that the bottle does not even break. 

General manager Tom Telesco’s go-to personnel tactic during his 11 seasons with the Chargers was extending the contracts of established veterans. Unfortunately, the Raiders’ few useful veterans are already lavishly compensated, and Davis is broke after spending his water-and-sewer-bill money on Christian Wilkins. Telesco handles the draft competently and rarely makes overtly foolish moves, making him the Only Adult in the Room: always a dangerous designation on the Raiders org chart.

Here are Antonio Pierce’s head coaching qualifications, in order of relevance:

• Maxx Crosby likes him.
• He works incredibly cheap.
• He is no less of a braying asshole than Josh McDaniels and Jon Gruden, but at least he’s a different sort of braying asshole.

Pierce, a solid NFL linebacker in the 2000s, became Arizona State’s recruiting coordinator and linebackers coach in 2017. Herm Edwards promoted Pierce to Associate Head Coach/Co-Defensive Coordinator in 2020. Pierce held onto his recruiting duties, where he was “the ringleader in orchestrating the recruiting violations,” according to an NCAA investigation. 

“Most of the violations were related to what the NCAA referred to as a ‘scheme’ orchestrated by Pierce to circumvent restrictions in place during the COVID-19 pandemic,” wrote ESPN’s Kyle Bonagura. “Pierce facilitated impermissible recruiting contact with 35 prospects, including ‘tryouts, football facility tours and entertainment.’ It was also determined he directed an assistant to engage in tampering with a player enrolled at another school and traveled out of state to observe and meet with prospects during a recruiting dead period.”

The NCAA slapped Pierce with an eight-year “show cause” order (exile, basically) in October. McDaniels either didn’t know or didn’t care about Pierce’s role as a pandemic party planner when he added Pierce to his defensive staff in 2022. 

Pierce spent one-and-a-half seasons as a linebackers coach before earning an interim promotion to head coach when McDaniels was fired. The Raiders went 5-4 against teams quarterbacked by Tommy DeVito, Zach Wilson, Easton Stick, Jarrett Stidham and … um, Patrick Mahomes (thanks to two defensive touchdowns). Crosby publicly pounded the table for Pierce, Davis was cowed by both Crosby and his accountants, and most of us in the media responded with a “why the hell not?” shrug.

Pierce started his tenure by stating on Crosby’s podcast (lest anyone question who wears the pants in Vegas) that the Raiders planned to use 1990s Detroit Pistons-style “Jordan Rules” on Mahomes: hits that straddle the borderlines of the rules, essentially. Nothing projects head-coaching readiness in 2024 like publicly suggesting you plan to deliver cheap shots to the NFL’s biggest star. Pierce began dickering with his mediocre quarterbacks in minicamp and is still doing so. He’s as far out of his depth as a Panera Bread night manager would be as a hostage negotiator.

The Raiders offense is now run by the father-and-son team of Scott and Norv Turner; the elder Turner coached the Raiders to a 9-23 record in 2004-05 and had been out of the NFL since 2020 before being summoned to fill a manpower shortage last week. Patrick Graham, Pierce’s boss until last November, still runs the defense and no-doubt realizes that he is the third wheel in the Crosby-Pierce bromance. 

Tom Brady invested in the Raiders as a minority owner the way other middle-aged divorcees might splurge on a speedboat: mindless of the consequences and tacitly embarrassed by the implications.

The astonishing return of Norv Turner! I’m not sure the Herm Edwards coaching tree is going to develop into a forest, but I guess we’ll see.

The decision of Fox to pay eleventy trillion dollars to replace their excellent #1 commentator with a guy who is basically forbidden by league rules to say anything interesting because he’s also a team owner probably merits its own thread down the line.