The Raiders Will Not Fire Josh McDaniels This Season

The Las Vegas Raiders hit their lowest point in a season full of low points on Sunday as they lost at home to the very bad Indianapolis Colts, 25-20. It frankly feels impossible for things to get worse than they are right now. Losing at home to a subpar team is bad. It is even worse when that team had just fired its head coach days prior. It's catastrophic when the new coach is Jeff Saturday.

It's not like the Colts are running laps around the Raiders in terms of talent, either. Las Vegas was simply outplayed and, somehow, outcoached. Josh McDaniels has been in charge since the summer and got clowned by a guy whose only head coaching experience before Sunday came at the high school level. I am running out of ways to talk about how bad the loss was.

McDaniels' Raiders career is off to the worst start possible. It's quite remarkable, really. No one could have ever predicted things would have gone this bad. But McDaniels will not be fired. Not this year, anyway.

Why would owner Mark Davis keep McDaniels despite *waves hand* all this? Well, there's the usual reasoning about how head coaches need more than a half season to really make things work. Firing McDaniels would accomplish basically nothing and sacrifice any hope that his program will pan out at some point in 2022. Las Vegas has struggled with injury and turnover luck, too. The defensive roster is much worse than anybody gave it credit for heading into the year. None of that is to say McDaniels is free of blame. The Raiders should have at least three more wins right now but blew three 17-point leads, which falls entirely on the McDaniels. No well-coached team is going to do that three times in one season even with all the bad luck in the world. He still isn't going to get fired.

The most important reason Davis is gonna ride it out with McDaniels is simple, though-- money. If he fires McDaniels he has to pay out his contract in some fashion. He already had to fork over cash to cover Jon Gruden's contract this time last year. Davis isn't going to do that to himself twice unless he absolutely has to. And while McDaniels has been terrible to start his Raiders career, he has done nothing to force Davis' hand. So he will stay unless he does something horrible. Even if the Raiders lose out on the year, Davis will wait until the offseason to can him.

So buckle up. McDaniels is not going back to New England or anything like that. He's going to stay put in Las Vegas for at least the 2022 season and probably the 2023 season if we're being honest. Coaches like him get a lot of runway. McDaniels may have already wasted any and all goodwill with the fanbase but he still has a lot to burn with Davis and the Raiders franchise.

Josh McDaniels is not going to get fired. Not yet.