If you’re a Giants fan, you’ll have to hope your team doesn’t lose to a franchise that just fired three top people in leadership and benched its veteran quarterback for a fourth-round pick.
Maybe New York will surprise the sportsbooks, but Vegas seems to think the home team will still take care of business.
Josh McDaniels is the first coach in NFL history to be fired by two different teams before the conclusion of his second year in charge.
For the second time in his head coaching ventures, former Denver Broncos head coach Josh McDaniels has been fired, this time by the Las Vegas Raiders.
McDaniels only had nine wins in less than two seasons with the Raiders, two wins shy of his Denver tenure. According to ESPN’s Paul Gutierrez, McDaniels now has the dubious distinction of being the first non-interim coach in NFL history to be fired by two different franchises before the end of his second season.
McDaniels’ tenure as a Bronco began with his first draft class bringing in Tim Tebow and the late Demaryius Thomas. The team started 6-0 in his first season. Thomas went on to be a Pro Bowl receiver, and Tebow led the Broncos to a miracle late-season playoff run that culminated in a wild-card win over the Pittsburgh Steelers.
McDaniels’ career in Denver was just as quick as the beginning. After a mid-season overseas game versus the San Francisco 49ers, it was discovered that a Broncos coach filmed 49er practices, eerily reminiscent of McDaniels’ mentor Bill Belichick’s “SpyGate” scandal. After “McSpyGate,” his coaching tenure came to an ignominious end, and McDaniels is widely considered one of the worst coaches in franchise history.
This season, the Raiders turned to veteran quarterback and McDaniels disciple Jimmy Garoppolo to right the ship after the departure of Derek Carr in the offseason. After a 3-5 start, McDaniels was deemed to have done his damage, and promptly fired by Raiders owner Mark Davis.
Will McDaniels ever find another head coaching job in the NFL? This writer highly doubts it!
Devin McCourty would be surprised if the Patriots don’t reach out to Josh McDaniels for a job.
Former New England Patriots safety Devin McCourty would be quite surprised if the team did not call Josh McDaniels, following his recent firing from the Las Vegas Raiders as head coach.
McDaniels was fired on Tuesday night, marking the end to his tenure. He recorded a 9-16 record with Las Vegas, after accepting the job in January 2022. This brings his career head coaching record to 20-33, after he went 11-17 with the Denver Broncos in 2009 and 2010.
McDaniels has been more successful as an assistant coach with the Patriots. He most recently was the team’s offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach in 2021.
McCourty spoke on “The Greg Hill Show” on Wednesday and indicated he would not be surprised if McDaniels returned to New England, via WEEI’s Mike Kadlick.
“I would not be surprised if Josh was back on staff,” said McDaniels. “But I also, you know, if I’m Josh like, hey man, we’ve still got four and a half years fully guaranteed. For this year, let’s take a little mental break for the rest of this season.
“…I think for New England, Josh has had so much success over there. I would be shocked if they don’t at least call him and say ‘Hey, do you want to come back and lend a helping hand, of some sort.'”
"I would not be surprised if Josh was back on staff. But I also, you know, if I'm Josh like, hey man, we've still got four and a half years fully guaranteed. For this year, let's take a…
McDaniels could potentially be a welcome mind for a Patriots organization that has been struggling to find success as of late.
Quarterback Mac Jones had his best year with McDaniels as offensive coordinator. So bringing him back into the fold could be a great long-term move, especially if the team wants to continue building around Jones.
What was the most excruciating part of McDaniels’ embarrassing tenure in Las Vegas? Was it blowing five double-digit leads for losses? What about the “ingenious” offensive mind overseeing a team that failed to score 20 points in nine of his last 10 games? I personally loved watching a coach who made it unclear whether he was actively sabotaging his own team. There’s honestly so much McDaniels disaster to choose from, it boggles the mind.
In just 25 short Las Vegas games, McDaniels turned himself into the NFL’s preeminent punching bag. And deservedly so. Let’s rank the worst moments (i.e., losses) of a coaching job that never went anywhere.
With Josh McDaniels available, could the Steelers make a move?
The Las Vegas Raiders cleaned out on Tuesday night including firing its general manager as well as head coach Josh McDaniels. This move makes McDaniels available and while things didn’t work out as a head coach, is a guy the Pittsburgh Steelers should consider to replace offensive coordinator Matt Canada?
McDaniels learned under the immortal Bill Belichick while he was with the New England Patriots and was the architect of some of the best offenses in the league as the offensive coordinator there. Did having Tom Brady figure into that success as well? Without a doubt.
Having said that, McDaniels is a great offensive mind and maybe he just cannot make that transition to running an entire team. This doesn’t diminish his particular set of skills. Not to mention, the bar is low for an offensive coordinator to be an upgrade over Canada.
During the bye week, head coach Mike Tomlin said the team has no plans to make any staff changes but this was before anyone thought the Raiders could cut McDaniels loose in the middle of the season.
Would the Patriots be interested in bringing Josh McDaniels back? Coach Bill Belichick responded on Wednesday morning.
New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick stayed true to form when asked about a possible reunion with recently fired Las Vegas Raiders coach Josh McDaniels.
“Just getting ready for Washington,” Belichick said, when speaking with media members on Wednesday morning.
Leave it to Belichick not to show his hand on game week. However, to be fair, the news of McDaniels’ firing came late Tuesday night, and everyone involved is still taking in everything that happened.
McDaniels, along with general manager Dave Ziegler and offensive coordinator Mick Lombardi, were all fired by the Raiders.
Bill Belichick on if the #Patriots would consider bringing back Josh McDaniels following being fired by the #Raiders:
Naturally, it would make sense for the Patriots to reach out to McDaniels once the dust settles to potentially come on as a senior offensive adviser. Fans are already reacting to the possibility of a reunion on social media.
It’s no secret that Mac Jones played his best stretch of football as a rookie under McDaniels as his offensive coordinator. The now third-year quarterback threw for 3,801 yards, 22 touchdowns, 13 interceptions and made the Pro Bowl.
The combination of McDaniels and Bill O’Brien under the hood could only mean good things for the struggling Patriots offense at this point.
Patriots fans are waking up and reacting to the news that Josh McDaniels has been fired as Raiders head coach.
The NFL world is waking up to the shocking news that the Las Vegas Raiders have fired both coach Josh McDaniels and general manager Dave Ziegler late Tuesday night.
It was a short-lived run for McDaniels in his second head coaching tenure. Just like his run with the Denver Broncos, he failed to make it a full two seasons with a team.
The Raiders were coming off back-to-back losses to the Chicago Bears and Detroit Lions and likely on the verge of another disappointing season with a 3-5 record. They finished third in the AFC West division last season with a pitiful 6-11 record.
McDaniels clearly has deep ties within the Patriots organization, and there will immediately be thoughts of him potentially returning in some capacity to either coach or serve as a senior offensive adviser in New England.
Josh McDaniels is merely the latest failure in the Raiders’ assembly line of them.
You can make the argument the most successful head coach the Raiders — previously of Oakland and now hailing from Las Vegas — have had the past two decades is … Rich Bisaccia.
This is notable because Rich Bisaccia is not a head coach.
Sure, he filled in at the position, but the longtime assistant has spent the bulk of his NFL career coaching special teams. After being promoted to the interim job following Jon Gruden’s 2021 resignation, his 7-5 regular season record led to a .583 win percentage that’s the highest of anyone who donned the headset for the Raiders since 2003. He’s responsible for half the team’s playoff appearances in those 20 years. He lost a Wild Card game by fewer than 14 points, which is the team’s postseason high water mark since Bill Callahan led the team to Super Bowl XXXVII.
This did not lead to greater opportunity. He was shown the door after that brief campaign and took a special teams role with the Green Bay Packers. The Raiders hired Josh McDaniels as his full time replacement. On Halloween night in Nevada — the wee hours of the morning on the East Coast — he was the first coach fired in 2023.
There’s something about this franchise that poisons whomever is calling the shots. For the most part, it’s been poor roster management and uninspired quarterback play. For Jon Gruden it was an inability to evolve with the NFL that went beyond whatever problems he brought — the insensitive language that led to his ousting, for one — off the field. For Jack Del Rio, it was a defensive coach who couldn’t find the escape velocity to blast through the gravity of a perpetually rancid defense.
Dennis Allen? Tom Cable? Hue Jackson? Lane Kiffin? They never had a chance.
This is the curse of the Raiders top job, a vacancy that will never go to the best candidate on the market because that is not what the Raiders do. They perpetually settle for retreads and assistants who haven’t risen above the fray as proven play-callers, yet get a rocket strapped to their back.
McDaniels had an 11-17 record in a season-plus in a previous stint as the Denver Broncos’ head coach before getting fired; he got the call anyway. Gruden had been a media personality for nearly a decade; he got the call anyway. Art Shell had been out of the game for six years; he got the call anyway. All failed in different ways, but failed spectacularly nonetheless.
Maybe that changes in 2024. Maybe Mark Davis, after being lambasted by fans over his latest awful hiring, decides to make a cultural shift. This is unlikely, given the entire existence of the Raiders franchise under the Davis family’s ownership, but not impossible. The thing is; who would want the job?
Even an upper crust candidate would have to deal with two decades of football that rarely scraped the face of mediocrity. Oakland/Las Vegas has ranked among the top 19 teams when it comes to points allowed just once in the past two decades — 2006, when it finished 18th in a two-win campaign. The Raiders have fielded a top 10 scoring offense twice in that span.
The franchise’s drafting is a perpetual blind spot. Since 2003 the team has earned 14 first-team All-Pro honors — one more than the sad-sack Cleveland Browns, the NFL’s standard bearers of sadness. That’s great, but more than half those awards have gone to special teamers and exactly half belong to punters (six for Shane Lechler, one for AJ Cole).
The Raiders’ most recent homegrown defensive All-Pro was Khalil Mack, who the team decided not to extend and instead traded to the Chicago Bears. Their most recent homegrown offensive All-Pro is Josh Jacobs, who the team also decided not to extend and who may be playing out his string in 2023 (albeit in a reduced capacity compared to his breakthrough 2022).
Is this a case of bad coaches failing to develop talent? A front office failing to provide its coaches with a roster capable of contention? Some unholy combination of both?
Either way, the upside of coaching in Las Vegas is wholly dimmed by the organization within. If you’re an upstart candidate interviewing for jobs this winter, what exactly is drawing you to the Raiders over, say, the Los Angeles Chargers or Tampa Bay Buccaneers or, hell, a non-Dan Snyder-owned Washington Commanders team?
That’s why any discussion about 2024’s hottest coaching candidates and rising stars will include an indelible asterisk when it comes to the Raiders’ job. There is a stink that followed this franchise from California to Nevada, and no amount of scrubbing has been able to erase it. Las Vegas isn’t a coaching job, it’s a longform experiment in mediocrity, the answer to a hypothesis that has never been fully thought out and possibly never will.
Josh McDaniels never had a chance, not that he would have been able to do anything with it if he had. The next man up will inherit Davante Adams, Maxx Crosby and a solid offensive line. He’ll also get Mark Davis, the ghost of Jimmy Garoppolo and a roster that’s soundly below average just about everywhere else.
The Raiders had to pay up for two people NOT to coach them.
The Las Vegas Raiders continue to struggle to find head coaches who will stick around and help the franchise win games.
The team hasn’t won a playoff game since 2002 (!!!!), and Mark Davis has cycled through coaches and general managers in an attempt to find some consistency.
The latest? He fired both Josh McDaniels (after just 25 games at the helm) and general manager Dave Ziegler, which Raiders fans loved. But let’s focus on McDaniels. ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported that he had over four years left on a six-year deal he signed and that the Raiders “are obligated to pay” him.
Yikes:
Raiders gave Josh McDaniels a six-year contract in January 2022. He has over four full year left on the deal that the Raiders are obligated to pay. pic.twitter.com/aOjrl7AtX7
We don’t have pure dollar figures here. But it’s pretty wild that the Raiders are paying what’s probably a lot of money to two people not to coach the team.
Detroit’s domination over the Raiders proved the final straw for McDaniels and Ziegler
The Las Vegas Raiders have fired head coach Josh McDaniels and GM David Ziegler in the wake of the team’s dreadful performance in Monday night’s loss in Detroit.
The Lions 26-14 win in a game that wasn’t at all competitive was the final straw for Raiders ownership. Demonstrative on-field complaints from top receiver Davante Adams and other players were finally heard. The Lions dominated the game, more than tripling the total yardage and gaining 29 first downs to just 12 for McDaniels’ pedantic offensive scheme.
Las Vegas is 3-5 at the time of the change. Former NFL linebacker Antonio Pierce takes over as the replacement coach.
