The Raiders did a little addition by subtraction when they dumped Josh McDaniels last week, and the thought process after just one game is that the team may have stumbled into a more effective play-caller in Bo Hardegree.
It was a surprise to some that the Raiders fired their previous offensive coordinator, Mick Lombardi, in favor of Hardegree, but the results have been all positive after one week.
”The players had gotten tired of McDaniels, but the difference in the first eight games and this win over the Giants wasn’t just due to emotions,” The Athletic’s Vic Tafur reported this week. “[Bo] Hardegree, 39, was calling plays for the first time in his life and he called a crisper, cleaner, more aggressive game than McDaniels had all season.”
In just two quarters with Hardegree calling plays, the Raiders racked up 24 points and that would have been enough to be the Raiders’ highest offensive output for a full game this year. Yes, it was against the Giants, but the Raiders have played a lot of bad teams this year and been held under 20 points.
Sports Illustrated insider Hondo Carpenter said this week that the team has a tremendous amount of confidence in their new 39 year-old play caller.
The coaches are comfortable working with Hardegree and the players are responding to his new approach…
“I was texting with a player yesterday, who said to me ‘It was great. Guys [were] coming off the field telling Bo what they see. He’s asking them… Is there anything you think we can do different? Is there something we’re missing?’ The communication is exponentially different,” Carpenter said the Las Vegas Raiders Insider podcast.
Players were growing increasingly uncomfortable with McDaniels as the “offensive guru” and it’s one of the reasons that Raiders’ owner Mark Davis apologized to several players for the failed ‘Patriot Way’ experiment.
“I had someone tell me this morning ‘We would have beaten the Chargers if the game had been called offensively like it was [in the Giants game],’” Carpenter said in recent LVRI podcast episode, and it’s fair to wonder if the Raiders would have at least two more wins if McDaniels had been ousted sooner.
It may have cost Davis a fortune, but the decision to fire McDaniels was one that had to be made. It seems the Raiders owner “smartened up” just in time to maybe save the season.
twitter: @raidersbeat
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Look , anybody would have been an upgrade. The ways that McDaniels lost games this and last year were atrocious. Warren Sapp said it best… when someone shows you who they are… ( McDaniels in Denver) believe them. The play calling was just one aspect of this epic failure. I really believe any more time given to that regime would have further destroyed our personnel . Getting virtually nothing for Carr and Waller, minimizing Renfrow and Adams… signing Garoppolo and Chandler Jones… gimme a freaking break. This guy was a wrecking ball that will take a full year to recover from.
I like to think of McDaniels as an offensive gnu not guru . A decent top 20 in the nation high school coordinator coul have done just as well if not better.