Insider Points to No. 1 Reason the Raiders Have Underperformed this Season

Nothing has gone right for the Raiders this year, but has there been a single most consequential mistake that led to the team’s 2-8 record?

There’s no question that injuries played a significant role.

Losing Malcolm Koonce and Christian Wilkins decimated the defensive line, and a minimally invested Davante Adams took a huge toll on the team, as well.

But the biggest failure of the Raiders’ 2024 season was evident last week when interim offensive coordinator Scott Turner turned the offensive into a respectable unit in just a matter of days.

The decision to fire offensive coordinator Luke Getsy seemed to jumpstart the offense two weeks ago, and even though the Raiders only scored 19 points against the Dolphins, it looked like a competent offensive game plan for the first time in months.

Sports Illustrated insider Hondo Carpenter has talked about the Getsy hiring and firing at length, and he called team’s terrible offense “the elephant in the room” of the first half of the season.

No one wanted to point fingers at Getsy and some of his assistants, but it became clear that the offense wasn’t going to move forward without changes to the coaching staff.

“I never think it’s just one reason why a team underperforms like this one. I think there were a lot of reasons and I’m going to get into [that] at the end of the year,” Carpenter said this week on the Las Vegas Raiders Insider podcast. “But if I had to pick the biggest, outside of injuries, it would be the terrible offensive coaching leading up to the firing of everybody. It was really bad.”

“Clearly, there were mistakes in the hiring of some of the staff,” Hondo continued. “[There were] poor decisions made on hiring offensive staff that put this team behind the eight ball. That’s just the reality… [You] have to address the issue of the elephant in the room… this team was put behind the eight ball with some poor offensive hiring and I think it hurts some players. I think it hurts some players’ confidence.”

Head coach Antonio Pierce will never say it, but his biggest regret of the season has to be the direction he chose for the offense in the offseason. Getsy wasn’t Pierce’s first choice to be the Raiders’ offensive coordinator this year, and it would be interesting to know what led him to go with Getsy, who had just been fired from the same position by the Chicago Bears.

In hindsight, it would have been nice to see what Turner could have done with an entire offseason to build an offense. We will still get the opportunity to see Turner run the offense, but it’s too late to change the trajectory of the season.

One of the players that lost the most confidence under Getsy was probably Gardner Minshew. Carpenter didn’t mention Minshew by name, but that had to be one of the players he was referring to.

The question now… did the coordinator change in Las Vegas happen soon enough to save Pierce from losing his job?

According to Jay Feely, who was part of the CBS broadcast crew covering the game on Sunday, Pierce was candid in production meetings last week about why he fired Getsy.

He was trying to save his job.

“It’s been a week of change for his Raiders team,” Feely said during the television broadcast.

“I give Antonio Pierce a lot of credit because it’s not easy as a first-time head coach to make a decision halfway through your first season and say ‘I’m going to fire my offensive coordinator; I’m going to fire my quarterbacks coach and my offensive line coach.’ He was pretty transparent with us. He said because I want to be wearing these colors next year and he felt like now was the time that he needed to make that move.”