HENDERSON, Nev. — Was coach Antonio Pierce set up to fail? Or were his staff hires, game-management issues and 0-6 record in the AFC West too much for Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis to sign off on another year?
Less than one calendar year after hiring Pierce as the full-time head coach, and after several days of consulting with new minority owner Tom Brady and other advisors, Davis finally delivered the bad news. In a meeting between the two early Tuesday afternoon, Davis fired Pierce.
— Las Vegas Raiders (@Raiders) January 7, 2025
The decision came a day after Pierce spoke to the media as if he expected to be back. During his scheduled news conference Monday following the Raiders’ loss in Sunday’s season finale, he spoke constantly about 2025. According to several players, he had the same tone in the final meeting between players, coaches and executives.
“We’re going to look back and say, ‘OK, why?’ and we’re going to figure out that, ‘why,’ over the next couple months. Then we get back in this bad boy,” Pierce said Monday. “We’ll be OK.”
General manager Tom Telesco will be OK, at least. According to team and league sources, Davis is retaining Telesco, who was hired after Pierce last year. While he wasn’t involved in the decision to fire Pierce, Telesco will join Davis, president Sandra Douglass Morgan and minority owners Brady and Richard Seymour, among others, on the committee to select the next coach.
For Davis, it’ll be the sixth head coach he’s hired since becoming the franchise’s controlling owner in 2011. He was confident Pierce was the right man a year ago after the former linebacker went 5-4 as the interim coach and had players talking about bringing back the old Raiders staples of physicality and swagger.
What went wrong?
Bloated coaching staff was a miss
The Raiders entered the 2024 season with a 32-person coaching staff, which made it one of the largest in the NFL. As they would soon find out, though, bigger doesn’t always mean better.
Pierce’s first major task after landing the job was constructing a coaching staff. He retained defensive coordinator Patrick Graham, special teams coordinator Tom McMahon and multiple other assistants from former coach Josh McDaniels’ staff. But he still had to fill other crucial roles, including offensive coordinator.
The Raiders had an agreement in place with Kliff Kingsbury for the job, but he backed out and took the same position with the Washington Commanders. The Raiders offered Kingsbury a two-year contract — the franchise standard for assistant coaches — while the Commanders put a three-year deal on the table, according to league sources. Kingsbury also felt the Commanders had a clearer path to a quarterback — they wound up drafting Jayden Daniels with the second pick in the draft — and a superior coaching staff, according to league sources.
Pierce also considered Chip Kelly as an option, but he wanted to bring too many of his staffers from his previous role at UCLA, according to league sources. Kelly instead took a job as the offensive coordinator at Ohio State.
Pierce landed on Luke Getsy, who’d just been fired after a two-year run as the Chicago Bears’ offensive coordinator. Raiders fans bemoaned the pick, and they were right.
It was a puzzling hire. The Bears offense was bad under Getsy, and Pierce citing Chicago’s 2023 win over the Raiders as a reason to hire him did little to allay fans’ concerns. That sentiment was validated when the Raiders offense struggled mightily and Getsy was fired just nine games into the season alongside offensive line coach James Cregg and quarterbacks coach Rich Scangarello.
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The offensive operation looked cleaner after Scott Turner was promoted to interim offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach, Joe Philbin was promoted to interim offensive line coach and former head coach Norv Turner was brought in as a consultant, but it’s understandable if Davis wasn’t impressed. The Raiders averaged 17.9 points per game under Getsy and just 17.6 points under the Turners.
Not only were the Raiders going to need a new offensive coordinator, quarterbacks coach and offensive line coach this offseason, but they were also likely going to need a new defensive coordinator. That’s because defensive coordinator Patrick Graham’s contract expired at the end of the season. Graham was already set to explore different opportunities — he interviewed for the Cincinnati Bengals’ defensive coordinator job on Tuesday and is also set to interview for the Jacksonville Jaguars’ head-coaching gig.
Given how poorly it went the first time Pierce hired a coaching staff, there was plenty of reason for Davis to doubt his ability to find answers this time around.
Telesco gave Pierce a lousy quarterback situation
Here is where the Pierce supporters have a case.
For months last offseason, Pierce repeated to anyone who would listen that he didn’t want a Band-Aid at quarterback. That didn’t stop Telesco from signing the ultimate Band-Aid quarterback, Gardner Minshew II, for $15 million guaranteed in free agency.
Telesco believed Minshew was a solid option to compete with and potentially supplant incumbent starter Aidan O’Connell. Unfortunately for the Raiders, Minshew had by far the worst season of his career and was a turnover machine. He was benched three times in 10 games before breaking his collarbone.
Telesco had explored the possibility of drafting a quarterback last April. While the quarterback class was loaded, the Raiders only held pick No. 13 and likely would need to swing a trade to land one of the top six prospects.
The problem was the Bears, Commanders and New England Patriots all decided to hold onto their top three picks and draft Caleb Williams, Daniels and Drake Maye, respectively. The Raiders brass didn’t feel strongly enough about the next tier of quarterbacks — Michael Penix Jr., J.J. McCarthy and Bo Nix — to trade up, and all three players were gone by the time they got on the clock.
Las Vegas went on to draft tight end Brock Bowers, who had a record-breaking, All-Pro-caliber rookie season. But the Raiders remained one of the worst teams in the league, partially because they didn’t have a good answer at quarterback.
Minshew narrowly won a lackluster training camp competition against O’Connell, but Pierce said Monday he now wishes he’d gone with O’Connell instead. Getsy preferred the more mobile, experienced option (Minshew), but it’s one example where, as Pierce said Monday, he wished he’d followed his gut more.
“I was better at that last year,” Pierce said. “And this year I didn’t do what I wanted to do as much as I wanted to do it.”
Did it matter? At best, the Raiders would’ve won five or six games (instead of four) with O’Connell, but perhaps it would’ve kept Davante Adams’ attention longer.
Quarterback Gardner Minshew went 2-7 in nine starts for the Raiders in 2024 and totaled nine touchdown passes and 10 interceptions. (Rich Storry / Getty Images)
The Adams fallout and trade
Back when Davis was deciding whether to promote Pierce from his interim role, he turned to the Raiders’ three best players for their input. Adams, running back Josh Jacobs and defensive end Maxx Crosby all said they wanted him back. Crosby even said on his podcast that he would consider asking for a trade if Pierce didn’t get the full-time job.
But things changed quickly. The Raiders never really made Jacobs, a free agent, a competitive offer to return and he left for the Green Bay Packers. Adams vouched for Getsy, who was on the Packers staff with him, but the receiver was clearly never enthralled with the Minshew signing. And he didn’t hide that. Adams had come off as a bit of a diva in the Netflix documentary “Receiver” with his harsh criticism of former quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo, who struggled on the field but played hurt and was well respected in the locker room.
Team sources said it seemed like Adams wanted star treatment at training camp, and it was an issue behind the scenes with Pierce when Adams missed 10 days for the birth of his son and then said he wouldn’t play in preseason games. Adams may have thought Pierce owed him something for vouching for him, but Pierce was tiring of the pouting and target requests. Many thought Adams was one of the players Pierce was talking about when he said that some had made “business decisions” in the Week 3 loss to the Carolina Panthers.
Adams requested a trade on a Week 4 victory Monday, and the Raiders eventually got a third-round pick from the New York Jets for his services. Both sides likely deserve some blame, but from Davis’ perspective, one of the NFL’s best receivers asking out does not go in the positives column for Pierce.
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On Monday, Crosby made his weekly appearance on Jim Gray’s podcast and said that while he still likes Pierce, commenting on coaching hires is not part of his job description. That’s almost as good as the separation he gets from offensive tackles.
Pierce said his players still gave it their all for him despite the Raiders’ 10-game losing streak. The players, meanwhile, praised his leadership skills and honest approach, though some also cited a lack of detail and execution some weeks in practice.
So, if you’re Davis, the honeymoon was over. The clear mandate from the players wasn’t there anymore.
Pierce didn’t display growth in requisite skills for a head coach
Pierce’s greatest failing as a coach was his in-game decision-making. He was often conservative, mismanaged the clock frequently and failed to properly utilize challenges and timeouts. It cost the Raiders dearly in multiple games this season, starting with the decision to punt on fourth-and-1 at the 43 down six points late in the opener against the Los Angeles Chargers.
Pierce didn’t call plays on either side of the ball, so game management was arguably his most important responsibility during games. Continuously, he failed to perform in that area.
It wasn’t necessarily surprising that Pierce struggled; he was inexperienced. He had only 10 years of coaching experience — four in high school, four in college and two in the NFL — when he became the Raiders’ head coach. Davis always knew there would be growing pains, but the issue was there weren’t many signs of improvement.
Additionally, there were several moments where Pierce’s behavior off the field brought negative attention to the Raiders. In an appearance on Crosby’s podcast in the offseason, Pierce said he planned to institute “Patrick Mahomes rules” to rough up the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback.
There was the “business decisions” comment and then, a week later, liking an Instagram post that asked whether Adams had played his last down with the team.
Antonio Pierce’s struggles with game management cost the Raiders multiple times this season. (Candice Ward / Getty Images)
Only a few days later, Pierce was given an eight-year show-cause penalty by the NCAA for recruiting violations when he was an assistant coach at Arizona State. Among the 67-page report were details of Pierce telling recruiting staffers to take a group that included a prospect’s parents to a local gentlemen’s club. While all of the violations occurred before Pierce’s employment with the Raiders, that isn’t the type of headline any organization wants to see associated with its head coach.
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Perhaps Pierce would’ve grown into his role with more time, and maybe he deserved that given the Minshew and Adams messes and the fact that the defense lost five starters to injury for the season. But Davis closed the book after a 9-17 record in 26 games and decided, with Brady’s help, that what he saw wasn’t enough to retain Pierce.
Beyond hiring Pierce’s replacement, the Raiders’ next biggest priority this offseason will be finding a new starting quarterback. Since the previous regime benched and later cut Derek Carr two years ago, Las Vegas has had six different starting quarterbacks. All have performed much worse than Carr.
It is imperative to pair the next head coach, whether it’s a veteran or rookie, with a quality quarterback.
It’s “a glaring need,” Pierce, a lifelong Raiders fan, said after Sunday’s game.
(Top photo: Ethan Miller / Getty Images)
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