In reality, the comment may have slipped out by accident. Raiders coach Klint Kubiak had one eye on the locker room and had half-anticipated a question about the team’s underperforming running game before the half, one that he started to answer before CBS sideline reporter Tracy Wolfson was finished asking. And as he promised he would fix it, he also promised the Raiders would beat the Chiefs.
There was no Lane Kiffin in him. No P.J. Fleck in a maroon track suit performatively diving into a crowd surf. No Sean Payton half-smirk and pause for effect. Nothing in Kubiak’s cadence or affect suggested it was anything but a simple, verbal hiccup—not unlike Mike Macdonald’s classic We Did Not Care—that could end up defining this era of Raiders football. This was the NFL’s quiet man saying what was on his heart, having just downloaded the first half of football against one of the best teams in the NFL and not looking the least bit rattled.
In the end, the Chiefs won 30–27, handing the Raiders their first loss of the season, but it doesn’t feel all that ridiculous to count Sunday as the day the Raiders truly arrived. The NFL’s most expensive ticket for Sunday lived up to its billing, with Kubiak’s offense a few yards from a game-tying field goal attempt that would have taken the Chiefs into overtime.
Las Vegas was minus-two in the turnover battle, was blanked in the red zone and didn’t fare as well on third down as the Chiefs. The Raiders’ defense gave up 177 rushing yards to Kenneth Walker III and Ashton Jeanty countered with only 15 carries for 58 yards. Only seven of Kirk Cousins’s 31 completions landed in the arms of a wide receiver. Spit these projections into your AI model of choice trained on the Raiders’ history of offensive ineptitude and it would have projected a bloodbath.
Instead, it was a fumble with a little over three minutes to play on a kickoff that prevented the Raiders from answering a Chiefs’ touchdown late in the fourth quarter. That, or a decision Kubiak made—and would later say he didn’t regret—to pass off a makable field goal in the third quarter. We can say that these are the muscle-memory moments of a Chiefs team that contains the fossilized remnants of a thousand cardiac events over the past decade which ultimately make the difference. But we can also say that this is visual evidence of how short the learning curve has been for the NFL’s early shoo-in for Coach of the Year.
There was a clip during the second half where Raiders owner Mark Davis, fresh from touching up his third-grade picture day haircut, was beaming as he looked down at the field. Here is the son of an iconoclast whose clear affinity for that time has manifested in the absurdly large swings he has taken to save the franchise. Hunt down Jon Gruden like the Sasquatch and offer him so much money that a lifetime of Hooters television commercials couldn’t compete. Try to capture the fumes of the Patriots dynasty. Offer Tom Brady a bigger markdown to purchase the franchise than the off-holiday candle section at HomeGoods. But Kubiak was the one part of his experiment that didn’t fit the clear patriarchal bent.
We could credit the little tiny bits of Brady—Cousins being the Drew Bledsoe to Fernando Mendoza—but without a daily presence in the facility, this would be an insult to what Kubiak has installed. The Raiders’ offense is mashing through brilliant play design, both offensively and defensively. Las Vegas was able to gut a solid Chiefs defense via play-action despite the fact that, as we mentioned, the running game continues to be the one piece of this offense that has yet to align with what we imagined a Kubiak offense would look like. Defensive coordinator Rob Leonard will, once a game, yank a pressure that feels as if it were straight from a Ravens hellscape fever dream.
And that’s the point. With Gruden, and really with Josh McDaniels, everything was about constructing an idea of what the Raiders should look like—constructing a man to fill the familiar track suit, slicked-back haircut and glasses with the dangly silver chain—than it was actually building a kickass football team. Gruden’s re-debut on Hard Knocks had more terrible catch phrases than an early season of World Championship Wrestling and more blind confidence, groin-waving personnel moves than a week at the White House.
But Kubiak didn’t fall into the identity trap. He called his shot softly, in mid-jog, barely at conversational level. He was already onto the next thing, but not without being heard.
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MITCH GOLDICH
Mitch Goldich is a senior editor for Sports Illustrated, mostly focused on the NFL. He has also covered the Olympics extensively and written on a variety of sports since joining SI in 2014. His work has been published by The New York Times, Baseball Prospectus and Food & Wine, among other outlets. Goldich has a bachelor’s in journalism from Lehigh University and a master’s in journalism from the Medill School at Northwestern University. He is a Philly native, now living in Boston, and he invented and popularized the octopus, when the same player scores a touchdown and the ensuing two-point conversion.
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CONOR ORR
Conor Orr is a Senior Writer for Sports Illustrated with more than 15 years of experience covering the NFL. His work has been cited in Best American Sportswriting and has won a PFWAA award. Prior to Sports Illustrated, he covered both the Giants and Jets for The Star-Ledger. Conor lives in New Jersey with his amazing wife and three children.
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