NFL

Las Vegas Raiders 2024 NFL Season Preview and Picks

Photo of Scott Kacsmar Scott Kacsmar30/08/2024 - 10:46 am
(Photo by Brandon Sloter/Getty Images)

The Las Vegas Raiders learned the hard way last year why Josh McDaniels hasn’t worked out as a head coach in the NFL. We would say the team has moved on to a new era with Antonio Pierce as their latest head coach, but the success rate for those in-house promotions is not encouraging.

Pierce, who was 5-4 as the team’s interim coach last year, has the trust of his defensive players. But the offense might be a different story. The elephant in the room is that the Raiders have the least encouraging long-term quarterback situation in the NFL right now.

In a historic NFL draft where 6-of-12 picks were quarterbacks to start, the Raiders just missed out on all the fun with the No. 13 pick. We’ll talk about the mistake they may have made later in the draft, but going into a season with journeyman Gardner Minshew and second-year fourth-round pick Aidan O’Connell as your quarterback competition was a depressing sight to say the least.

That’s not good enough when you share a division with Patrick Mahomes, Justin Herbert, and now Bo Nix at quarterback. We’ll see if Pierce is good enough in a division that now has Andy Reid, Jim Harbaugh, and Sean Payton as its head coaches too. They have each won over 62% of their games in the NFL.

In fact, the 2024 AFC West will be the first NFL division since the 1970 merger to have three head coaches who have won at least 60% of their games in the regular season (min. 50 games coached).

It’s not surprising the sportsbooks are not optimistic about the Raiders in 2024. Their preseason win total is only 6.5 games. On the bright side, a poor season would put the team in position to draft its next franchise quarterback in 2025.

We look back at the end of McDaniels, the key offseason changes, the quarterback dilemma, and the best Raiders bets for 2024.

2023 Season Recap: The Handsome QB and His Bad Coach

From 3-5 with McDaniels to 5-4 with Pierce, the 2023 Raiders had a tale of two seasons. Neither was particularly helpful for 2024, but they both had their moments.

Can NFL Teams Stop Trying to Make “Josh McDaniels, Head Coach” Happen?

Say what you will about McDaniels, but he probably was right that the Derek Carr era ran its course for the Raiders. But when you bring in Jimmy Garoppolo for 2023 to try to facilitate some New England-type offense where you coached him for his first three years, then you have to get better results than this.

You can ignore the 17-16 score in Week 1 as that game had very few possessions. It was one of the best games all season for the offense, and it would be the highlight of the year for McDaniels and Garoppolo. All downhill from there.

The 2023 Raiders did not score 20 points on offense in any of their first eight games. Even in a 21-17 win against the lowly Patriots, it was a safety by the defense that pushed the Raiders over 20 points late in that game.

The only thing McDaniels and Garoppolo were getting out of this offense was raising the blood pressure of an extremely frustrated Davante Adams, who showed us how pissed he was against the Lions as captured by the Netflix series Receiver:

After the Raiders lost that game with 157 yards of offense to fall to 3-5, that was the end of the road for this coach. The Raiders became the first team to fire their coach during the 2023 season. They also benched Garoppolo for rookie Aidan O’Connell for the rest of the season.

In 1.5 seasons, McDaniels was 9-16 (.360) as head coach of the Raiders before he was fired during his second season for the second time in his career. In 2022, it was about blowing six fourth-quarter leads. Last year, the Raiders could hardly even get those leads.

Needless to say, a weight was lifted from the team now that their tyrant was out of the building.

From 0 to 63 (Points) in Four Days

Go figure, the Raiders immediately scored a season-high 30 points in a big win against the Giants in the first game after McDaniels was fired. It helped that they were playing the Giants, but they looked like a much happier team under interim coach Antonio Pierce, who got a big promotion from coaching linebackers.

The early schedule was favorable to Pierce as he also got a 16-12 home win over the Jets, another putrid offense from New York. But the Raiders were solid enough on defense to hang in with Miami in a 20-13 loss where the offense just needed to step up better.

The offense was blazing hot against the Chiefs at home to start their Week 12 game, but after going cold, the Chiefs pulled away for a 31-17 win.

After the bye week, things got really weird for the Raiders. They lost a home game 3-0 to the Vikings with the only score coming on a late field goal drive. It should be impossible to have an NFL game that low scoring that was played indoors. It usually would take extreme weather making the playing surface unplayable to do that like what happened in the NFL’s last 3-0 game in Pittsburgh in 2007.

It’s not like the Vikings-Raiders game was sneaky offensive with a bunch of turnovers and missed field goals keeping the score down. There were 23 possessions with one missed field goal (by Minnesota), and the Raiders turned it over three times, including their final two snaps after falling behind.

Pitiful stuff. But in the biggest scoring turnaround in NFL history, the Raiders hosted the Chargers just four days later on Thursday Night Football. The Chargers just ruled out Justin Herbert with an injury, and then they promptly quit on coach Brandon Staley after allowing 63 points to the Raiders. It was 49-0 at one point early in the third quarter, and the Raiders also led 63-7 before a couple of garbage time touchdowns for the Chargers, who fired Staley after that embarrassing loss.

The funny thing about that game is the Raiders had a season-high 378 yards of offense, but that makes them only the second team in NFL history to score at least 63 points without hitting 400 yards of offense. They just beat up on a team that seemed to show up to the stadium defeated that night. The Raiders had a season-high five takeaways that night too.

We didn’t see the Raiders again until Christmas afternoon in Kansas City as a heavy underdog. After a long drive in the first quarter, quarterback O’Connell never completed another pass in the final three quarters of the game. You might think that would mean the Raiders were blown out or he was injured, but neither of those things happened.

Instead, the Raiders forced Patrick Mahomes into a couple of turnovers that were returned for touchdowns in a span of 7 seconds to take a 17-7 lead that held up as the defensed chased Mahomes around all game long in a 20-14 upset.

That game served as a wake-up call to the Chiefs, who never lost the rest of the year on their way to repeating as Super Bowl champs. Andy Reid reportedly texted a thank you message to Pierce for that game showing the team their effort wasn’t good enough.

So, credit the Raiders for the Chiefs repeating? After losing to the Colts, the Raiders won their eighth-straight game against Denver (8-0 since 2020) in Week 18 as the Broncos had benched Russell Wilson and basically gave up on the season too.

A lot of questionable efforts in the AFC West last year. But with that 5-4 finish, the Raiders felt confident enough to remove the interim tag from Pierce. We’ll just have to see if that was the right move after a weird finish that saw Pierce face five teams who lost their starting quarterback to a season-ending injury and a sixth team (Denver) that benched their starter for financial reasons.

Las Vegas Raiders Offseason Review

We’ll get into the quarterback situation in the next section, but the Raiders also have a new offensive coordinator as they try to move on completely from the McDaniels era on that side of the ball. The draft also presented an opportunity to grab an elite tight end prospect, and free agency brought in a new partner in crime for Maxx Crosby up front on the defense.

But first we have to question the Pierce hiring.

Was Promoting Antonio Pierce the Right Call?

Hiring a head coach is one of the most important parts of running an NFL team. Promoting a coach who was already on the staff has been a risky move in the past, and it gets even riskier when you have some red flags that are present in the case of Antonio Pierce with the Raiders.

First, rookie defensive coaches are not in style in today’s NFL. We looked in our Seattle preview for rookie coach Mike Macdonald how the recent hirings of defensive-minded coaches have largely not gone well in the NFL. Of the few who have worked out, those teams had an offense and quarterback to lean on like Sean McDermott in Buffalo (Josh Allen), Mike Vrabel in Tennessee (Ryan Tannehill), and DeMeco Ryans last year in Houston (C.J. Stroud).

Pierce has credibility with players since he was a former player himself for the Giants. But as a coach, he was only the Raiders’ linebackers coach and not the defensive coordinator, the job most coaches on the defensive side had before they became a head coach. The Raiders have kept defensive coordinator Patrick Graham for Pierce’s 2024 staff. The results for Pierce and Graham over the past two seasons are not great enough to think more changes weren’t needed in a proper housecleaning for the Raiders.

If your coach was fired before Halloween, something is not right with that team’s process. We looked in our New England preview for rookie coach Jerod Mayo how the recent in-house promotions of coaches have not gone well.

It’s troubling when you see Jason Garrett (the Cowboys’ Clapper) as the most successful in-house promotion in the last 20 years. It also feels like a bigger gamble when you promote a coach from a staff that fired the head coach during the season like the Raiders did compared to someone taking over as a promotion like when Jim Caldwell replaced a retired Tony Dungy for the 2009 Colts. Caldwell won his first 14 games and reached the Super Bowl that year.

Of course, Caldwell had Peyton Manning in his MVP prime, before four neck surgeries, leading seven fourth-quarter comebacks for half of those 14 wins.

That’s the other problem Pierce is going to face this year. The Raiders aren’t giving him much to work with at quarterback between Minshew and O’Connell. His goal is clearly to make the Raiders a team led by its defense, but that’s hard to do in the NFL with the way the rules are now.

You’re not going to play offenses as bad as the 2023 Giants and Jets that often. You can’t expect the Chargers to quit against your team like they did last year in the 63-point outlier, which again, came four days after Pierce lost a 3-0 home game indoors.

The saving grace of the season for Pierce was the Christmas win in Kansas City, but how can you really celebrate not completing a pass after the first quarter? Good luck getting two defensive touchdowns in 7 seconds again from Mahomes, or any quarterback for that matter.

You can still win as a defensive coach in the NFL. We just wrote a 5,300-word preview about the Houston Texans winning the Super Bowl this year behind defensive coach DeMeco Ryans. But the difference is Ryans has his quarterback figured out as we also picked Stroud to win MVP in 2024. He has his offensive coordinator in Bobby Slowik, who learned from Kyle Shanahan. They have great weapons.

The Raiders took a fluky path to 8-9 last year, and if they don’t quickly figure out the quarterback and offensive component to this team, it’s hard to see Pierce lasting long in this division. The positive results last year are not sustainable.

New Offensive Coordinator Luke Getsy Has Some Weapons At Least

The Raiders hired Luke Getsy as their new offensive coordinator after he was fired in Chicago following two poor seasons with Justin Fields as his quarterback. Getsy already learned the hard way about leaving Aaron Rodgers in Green Bay for Chicago’s usual level of passer, but we will acknowledge that Fields is a rare case of struggles given his obscenely high sack rate and anti-clutch play with the game on the line.

When Tyson Bagent had to start last year, Getsy had some decent success at calling a quicker passing game to get the undrafted rookie comfortable.

But in going to the Raiders, he has his work cut out for him again. Minshew is at least a coachable veteran who could be adequate in the right system, but it’s hard to say what Getsy’s system is after what we saw in Chicago.

The Raiders also need to rediscover their running game after a disappointing 2023 for Josh Jacobs, who won the rushing title in 2022. However, Jacobs is with the Packers now, so Zamir White could be the lead back this year. Cody Whitehair comes over from Chicago to play left guard, so he’ll know Getsy’s offense, which is probably why he has an early edge over second-round rookie Jackson Powers-Johnson. But the Raiders may be mediocre at best up front.

The talent on this offense lies at wide receiver with Davante Adams proving he can still get open with the best of them last year. He just needs someone to get him the ball. Jakobi Meyers is also a capable No. 2, but the depth after them is not great.

Then there’s the case at tight end. The team drafted Georgia tight end Brock Bowers, who was a highly-touted prospect that some experts think could be the next Travis Kelce, Rob Gronkowski, or George Kittle type of tight end in the NFL. We could use a young player like that in the league for sure, but rookies historically struggle at this position, last year withstanding for Sam LaPorta (Lions) and Dalton Kincaid (Bills).

The Raiders being the team to select Bowers was curious since they used a high second-round pick on Michael Mayer in 2023, and you would have thought Pierce would want a top defender as his first pick in 2024. Every defender in the draft was on the board at No. 13, but the Raiders took Bowers, which feels like a luxury pick for a team that’s so unsorted at quarterback and lacking elite defenders to go with Crosby.

Cole Kmet had a breakout year at tight end in Getsy’s offense in Chicago last year. It’s not like Bowers is going to overtake Adams in 2024, but we’ll expect to see something special from him this year.

It just gets a lot harder in an offense like this as Getsy was guilty in Chicago at times of trying to hide Fields.

Maxx Crosby Gets Some Help on Defense

We know Maxx Crosby is relentless as an edge rusher, and he was stellar again in 2023 with 14.5 sacks and 50 (!) pressures. The next three pass rushers on the Raiders combined had 44 pressures, so Crosby is a one-man wrecking crew who could use some help.

Again, I think Dallas Turner from Alabama would have been a nice pickup with that No. 13 pick, but the Raiders went with the tight end. Of course, they had already spent a lot of money in free agency on defensive tackle Chrisitan Wilkins from Miami, who agreed to a 4-year deal worth $110 million.

Wilkins is a talented player who picked an incredible time (contract year) to post a career-high 9.0 sacks (he had 11.5 sacks in 2019-22) and 23 quarterback hits. He shined against the Raiders in particular last season.

Now he’ll join Crosby up front for a team that will need to keep the score down to win with these quarterbacks.

This Year’s Narrative: Why Didn’t the Raiders Draft Spencer Rattler?

During the height of draft season and as late as draft day, the Raiders were in the quarterback market. Mock drafts had them moving up to take Jayden Daniels, and it was also a popular thought that they’d take someone like Michael Penix Jr. in the second round.

But draft night got a bit insane the moment the Falcons used their No. 8 pick on Penix instead of a defender or literally anyone but a quarterback after they paid Kirk Cousins $180 million in free agency. But that move seemed to shake up the board, and before you knew it, J.J. McCarthy went to the Vikings at No. 10 and the Broncos took Bo Nix at No. 12.

Just like that, the top six quarterbacks were all gone with the Raiders on the clock at No. 13. They obviously weren’t going to take a quarterback now, but everyone knew Spencer Rattler was the next-best quarterback prospect in this class.

The Raiders had ample chances to draft Rattler, and this is not revisionist history. On draft night after the first round ended, I wrote a joke here that “at the rate things were going, it was just a shock that the Raiders didn’t try drafting Spencer Rattler with the No. 13 pick.”

It was clear after 12 picks that the Raiders missed out on the quarterback bonanza at the top of the draft. But knowing they needed to get something to compete with Minshew and O’Connell, why wouldn’t they take a chance on Rattler in the fourth or fifth round?

Shockingly, Rattler was the seventh quarterback drafted as expected, but he had to wait 138 picks after Nix was drafted to land in New Orleans in the fifth round with the No. 150 pick.

Who picked No. 148? The Raiders selected linebacker Tommy Eichenberg. At least he seems to have made the 53-man roster this year, but are you going to tell me Eichenberg will hold more value than giving Rattler a shot?

I’m not even a Rattler fan, but I at least respect the process of throwing a mid-round dart at a quarterback many could see was the next best thing in this draft if you couldn’t get a top guy. It was worth a shot, and after the preseason, Rattler had more highlights for the Saints than anything the Raiders achieved in August.

Again, it’s unlikely the 150th pick in the draft amounts to much, but we are also living in a world where Brock Purdy, Mr. Irrelevant, just led the league in QBR and was a stop away by his defense from beating Mahomes in a Super Bowl. Has to be pretty upsetting that Purdy could lead three go-ahead drives in the fourth quarter and overtime and lose the Super Bowl to the Chiefs while O’Connell beats them without completing a pass after a quarter, but I digress. It’s a team game.

But if your quarterback isn’t any good, the rest of the team can go wasted. The Raiders seem to think they’re building well on both sides of the ball, but it is unlikely neither Minshew nor O’Connell can take this team far in 2024.

That’s just asking for NFL purgatory where you’re not good enough to get the top pick for your next quarterback, and you’re not good enough to make the postseason. Especially not in a conference loaded with quarterbacks.

The Raiders have to find their quarterback, and there is no reason to believe he’s on the roster right now. It would be quite funny if Rattler displaced former Raider quarterback Derek Carr in New Orleans and became a star in this league.

Then Tommy Eichenberg at No. 148 becomes the answer to a trivia question in Vegas forever.

Best Bets for the 2024 Raiders

Clearly, we’re on board with the Raiders producing a worse record than 8-9 in 2024. There are too many elite players on this roster for this team to flirt with the worst record in the league, but we are going against the grain and eyeing that under 6.5 wins line at the sportsbooks.

Where on this schedule does it look like the Raiders will get their wins this year?

  • Tough start with road games against the Chargers and Ravens, which means Pierce against the Harbaugh brothers. Probably a better chance of beating the Chargers at home in Week 18.
  • Carolina and Cleveland will be winnable home games in Weeks 3-4, and you should expect the Raiders to get at least a win there.
  • The Raiders are 8-0 against Denver since 2020, but look for Sean Payton to end that streak this year and get at least a split.
  • The Steelers won in Vegas last year in the only game Kenny Pickett ever threw multiple touchdowns in, but a Sunday afternoon game sounds ripe for an upset by the Raiders.
  • Really tough stretch before the bye in Weeks 7-9 when the Raiders will have to outscore the Rams, Chiefs, and Bengals.
  • A return to Miami after the bye, but Mike McDaniel is usually reliable at home.
  • The Raiders are in Kansas City on the holidays again, but this time it’s Black Friday. Think Mahomes will forget the Kermit doll from training camp? Chiefs won’t half-ass that one.
  • Three NFC South games late in the year, so you like to think the Raiders can win at least one of those. They host the Falcons on a Monday night, Kirk Cousins’ least favorite night.
  • Hosting the Jaguars in Week 16 will be a tough game too.
  • Derek Carr Revenge Game in Week 17 in New Orleans.

The division should be better, the NFC South might finally produce a 10-win team again, and the Raiders have tough road games with the Ravens, Bengals, Rams, and Dolphins, all winning teams from last year who can score points.

If you score more than 20 points, Minshew is 2-19 as a starter in his career. That’s why I’m trusting my gut and going with the Raiders to do no better than 6-11 this year.

NFL Pick: Las Vegas Raiders under 6.5 wins (+120 at BetMGM)

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Photo of Scott Kacsmar Scott Kacsmar30/08/2024 - 10:46 am