With the additions of Tom Brady, John Spytek and Pete Carroll, the Raiders had high hopes going into the 2025 season.
Carroll was supposed to bring a Super Bowl pedigree to Las Vegas, and when the 73-year-old head coach was able to bring his hand-picked quarterback to the Raiders, it felt like the organization might finally be moving in a better direction.
”I was trying to get that done from the moment this thing happened. I was hoping we could do something [to get Geno Smith],” Carroll said in May of last year.
“This opportunity [came] up and we needed a quarterback. Really, it was a classic opportunity for us to really transition to a quarterback and a coach that see eye to eye on everything. Geno has killed it here. He’s been such a factor. The leadership he brings, his work ethic, the mentality his brings, it’s been a fantastic assistance to turning this thing over.”
Unfortunately, the Carroll and Smith experiments failed miserably, and the 2025 season was one of the worst in recent memory.
A lot has been reported on want went wrong for Carroll in his single season with the Raiders, and long-time football host and columnist Robert Mays added a few more details on his podcast last week.
“I was talking to a coach from a different team today, just completely without provocation, started talking about the Raiders last year and what it was like to watch the Raiders offense,” Mays said on The Athletic Football Show.
“He was like, they ran every cool play a team had run over the past two weeks and it had absolutely no cohesion or fundamental principles to it. It wasn’t built on anything, and I think you could feel that when you watched them.”
Mays and his co-hosts pointed blame at former offensive coordinator Chip Kelly, and rightfully so, but it’s worth keeping in mind that Kelly wasn’t Carroll’s choice to be his offensive coordinator in 2025.
In December, Raider Nation Radio host Q Myers talked about the organizational power structure in Las Vegas and said he was under the impression Kelly answered to Brady, as opposed to the head coach.
“I didn’t think his boss was ever Pete Carroll,” Myers said on his Dec. 23 episode of the Locked on Raiders Squad Show podcast.
“When a guy that’s supposedly underneath one guy and he’s actually not underneath him, it’s hard to establish who’s calling what. So when Chip Kelly got fired, I think it surprised all of us only because I thought he answered to Tom Brady, where Pete Carroll answered to Mark Davis. I didn’t see that dynamic really being the way that it should have been.”
Most seem to be in agreement that Kelly wasn’t Carroll’s first choice at offensive coordinator, but Carroll also added two of his sons to the coaching staff and the Raiders’ offensive line was, without question, the worst offensive line in the league under Brennan Carroll.
Going back a few weeks before Myers’ comments, The Athletic’s Ted Nguyen said the disfunction within the building was as bad as it has ever been.
“Going back to the Ian Rapoport report in that article, he said that Chip Kelly didn’t get to run his offense. He had to run a lot of things that Pete Carroll wanted to run. He had to go away from the shotgun and go more under center, which is what Pete Carroll wanted to go to,” Nguyen said in November on the Just Win podcast.
“[He] linked it to the Shane Waldron offense and basically implied that Chip had to run that type of offense and didn’t really get to do what he wanted as an offensive coordinator,” Nguyen continued. “And obviously, that just speaks to the level of dysfunction in his offense, because you don’t pay a guy to be the highest paid offensive coordinator and not allow him to run his offense. But why would you even want to bring that guy in in the first place, if you’re just going to dictate what he can do?”
“Maybe it was a Tom Brady hire, and it was forced upon Pete. But again, just dysfunction. The ideas and philosophies not lining up together, which is what we’ve seen from the Raiders in the past. And honestly, there’s more that I can’t tell you guys right now, but it’s as bad as it’s ever been. And I don’t know if Pete’s going to last after this year. I’ve never seen that before, where you bring in a offensive coordinator, you just don’t allow him to run his offense.”
x: @raidersbeat
The result were very much uncool.
And those terrible results were on Tom Brady and John Spytek. For his credit Mark gave Tom that ownership deal to establish an identity. Year 1 was just about as bad as it could get. Maybe they should’ve actually truly brought in Ben Johnson. Then maybe R. Salah would’ve said yes to the DC position. A true rebuild would’ve already been underway. And we wouldn’t have been stuck with a RB at #6 overall.