The Raiders are closing in on their worst season win total since 2006, and there has been plenty of commentary in recent weeks about what has gone wrong in Pete Carroll’s first year as head coach.
One of the more recent remarks on Carroll came last week from one of his predecessors on the Raiders’ sideline.
Jack Del Rio was a guest on FOX 5’s The Den and was asked about his former team and its direction under Carroll.
“You asked me my opinion; I’m just going to be honest. I’m not trying to crush the guy or anything, but it’s a little bit to me… I don’t see or feel the buy in from his messaging,” Del Rio said of the players’ response to Carroll this season.
“Pete’s always had kind of more of a collegiate kind of a ‘rah rah’ mentality and I don’t know that that fits the Raiders… the Raiders are John Madden doesn’t care about the rules and go out there and kick somebody’s a–. That’s what the Raiders are about and that’s what they were about when we were there. When we were together there in Oakland, our teams were physical. To me it starts in the trenches. They have a lot of work to do… heck, they’re finally playing the one offensive lineman. They finally put him in the game. He hadn’t played the whole year, the draft pick.”
Del Rio also brought up his departure from the organization in 2017 and said his firing “stung” but wasn’t necessarily a surprise.
“It stung when Mark [Davis] let me go the way he did. He just was so much in love with [Gruden] and he couldn’t help himself,” Del Rio said.
“But [Davis] was honest the whole time. He told me if ‘I could ever get Gruden, that’s what I’m going to do.’ So it’s not like he was behind my back, not being honest about it. That’s the guy he really wanted. He got him. Unfortunately, Jon didn’t do what we did. We had a hell of a team going there and it got blown up. That’s a shame. They haven’t been back since.”
Del Rio joked about the Raiders someday bringing him back, and while there’s no reason to believe that would ever happen, his .521 winning percentage with the team is better than everyone who came after him (unless you count interim HC Rich Bisaccia, who went 7-6 in relief of Gruden in 2021).
Gruden’s winning percentage in his second stint with the Raiders was just .423, which was still better than Josh McDaniels (.360) and Antonio Pierce (.346).
Carroll’s Raiders played better on Sunday in a losing effort to the Houston Texans, but his winning percentage in Silver & Black is .133 through 15 games and there’s a good chance he is only going to get two more games to improve on that mark.
Last week, ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler shared his thoughts on the Raiders and Carroll’s future with the team…
“Pressure is mounting on Pete Carroll in Las Vegas after the team has struggled to stay competitive at 2-12,” Fowler said.
“Here’s my sense after asking around Tuesday: The Raiders knew 2025 would be a bit of a slog due to some roster deficiencies, but they hoped they would stay competitive — at least more so than this season’s horrific point differential of minus-167, trailing only the Titans (minus-169). One team source acknowledged, “It wasn’t supposed to be this bad,” and that something will need to change…”
Whether removing Carroll is that change has not been crystallized. But the proverbial hot seat chatter doesn’t appear to be going away. As one source with knowledge of the Raiders’ operation noted, what the team needs is what it thought it had with Antonio Pierce — a high-energy first-time head coach with a high ceiling. The Raiders didn’t have enough patience to find out whether Pierce (who went 4-13 in his only full season in Vegas, saddled by bad quarterback play) could mature into that. Either way, the Raiders appear to be in danger of a second consecutive one-and-done in the top leadership role.”
x: @raidersbeat
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This all makes a lot of sense