Will Antonio Pierce be back with the Raiders next year?
That’s the big question around the Raiders going into the last month of the season, and there haven’t been a lot of clues to what team owner Mark Davis might be thinking on the matter.
Former NFL cornerback Richard Sherman said this week that he believes Pierce was set up for failure with the Raiders and deserves another year with a better roster in place. NBC’s Mike Florio, however, thinks it’s a foregone conclusion that Pierce will be let go after the season.
“I feel like it’s a foregone conclusion [that Pierce will be fired],” Florio said this week on The Rich Eisen Show. “The game management on Friday was horrendous. We got so caught up in that botched snap and then was it an illegal shift? Was it a false start? Was it a live ball? We forget about the fact that Antonio Pierce said his objective in that moment was to have Aidan O’Connell throw the ball away and burn off four or five more seconds. Dude, all you had to do was wait to spike the ball on the prior play.
“When kids play Madden and they understand how to manage these game situations as well as anyone,” Florio continued. “When an NFL head coach fails a critical game situation it becomes even more glaring, so I think it’s become a foregone conclusion and there’s plenty of chatter that Mike Vrabel is going to end up there.”
It’s all speculation at this point, but Pierce doesn’t necessarily deserve blame for every aspect of the way Friday’s game played out in Kansas City.
A timeout could have been called later than it was, but the Raiders were in “no man’s land” in terms of trying to run another play to get closer for a field goal. Daniel Carlson had already missed three field goals in the game, so it would have been ideal to get a few more yards with a sideline throw. Maybe Pierce changed his mind and decided to run out the clock when he thought of O’Connell scrambling to the sideline to avoid a sack or intentional grounding.
Whatever the case, the Raiders should have been able to execute a throw-away. They couldn’t pull it off in a loud stadium and the head coach is always the first to be second guessed.
Ultimately, the Raiders have five more games on the schedule and the next several weeks will go a long way toward determining Pierce’s future with the team.
With a few wins in December, Pierce could conceivably save his job and knock the Raiders out of position to draft one of the top quarterbacks in the draft.
x: @raidersbeat
Well, I’m not a Florio fan, he’s absolutely 125% correct on that!
Pretty sad how nobody brought that up. And a perfect reason above all others to fire him. Especially when he said he’d do it again. AP’s Failure to accept culpability for his own mistake seals his fate.
I don’t see why it was necessary to burn additional time off of the click. The odds are that KC wasn’t going to move within FG range and kick the FG with 10sec. remaining. We have too many good head coaches in the division to continue with AP’s incompetence.
Lose out and draft a QB because it would be just dumb to continue to try and win anymore games and miss out on drafting a future franchise quarterback here’s a Al Davis Quote if you ain’t cheating you ain’t trying so plain and simple we need a QB and to win games at this point is just Dumb.
I was a AP fan from the beginning but how the hell do you go from bad to worse and expect to keep your job? Unless you know something we don’t, like one person in the draft next year is gonna make things better for the team, well good luck with that. You do know the definition of insanity right?!?