Last week, I wrote an article on why the Raiders need to fire Josh McDaniels. The biggest problem with the Raiders is Mark Davis.
While McDaniels is a symptom of the illness that is plaguing the Las Vegas Raiders, he is merely the common cold. The true illness that is harming the Las Vegas Raiders resides in the owner’s suite. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a vaccine in sight for the team.
The Raiders prior to Mark Davis taking over the team, weren’t good. Everybody who watched the Raiders from 2003-2009 laughed at their mere existence because, for the first time in the Al Davis era, the team was bad for a sustained amount of time. They were up and down in the 1990s, but 03-09 was the first time the Raiders were truly bad, no matter what Al tried to do.
In a way, the Raiders have come full circle to where they were prior to Mark assuming ownership. They never evolved; they merely moved out of the Bay Area to the Las Vegas desert and are owned by a Davis with a worse haircut.
Former Raiders Owner Al Davis – Jose Carlos Fajardo/Contra Costa Times)
The team went 8-8 in 2010, including going undefeated against the AFC West, 7-0 if you count former division rival Seattle, whom the Raiders also defeated that year, yet they missed the playoffs. No team had ever gone undefeated against their own division and missed the playoffs.
This set the stage as Mark assumed ownership during the 2011 season after Al passed away, and the team crumbled down the stretch and went 8-8 again. It took awhile, but starting with head coach Hue Jackson that offseason, Mark went to work and removed various figures from the Raiders that had been associated with Al for decades, such as former team president Amy Trask.
This is normal in any succession. Al’s people weren’t Mark’s people, and I’m not going to begrudge him for that. As I’ll explore, not everything Mark Davis has done as owner of the Raiders has been bad. However, it’s notable because Mark has still gone to a lot of the same people for advice on who to hire to run football operations.
Mark came into ownership alongside his mother, Carol Davis, and immediately admitted that he didn’t know much about football. Al had kept him away from the football side of operations. His plan was to hire people who knew football and leave the football decisions to them while he handled the business aspects of things.
The problem with the Raiders isn’t on the business aspect of things. Mark is a far more successful businessman than Al was. He’s the owner of the Las Vegas Aces, a championship-winning WNBA team that, at the time of this writing, is on its way to try and repeat as champions. He moved the Raiders out of Oakland to Las Vegas. While it hasn’t been a success in terms of drawing in Raiders fans, it’s certainly been a massive financial success.
Mark’s massive failure ironically comes in the place where his father’s greatest successes were triumphed by the masses. Mark might be twice more profitable as a businessman than Al was, but his Raiders have absolutely no comparison to the greatness of the Raiders that Al fielded. The ones that every year, the old NFL Films yearly videos would boast as “professional sport’s winningest team” by showcasing their superior win percentage compared to the other dominant teams of every sport, such as the New York Yankees.
Raiders Owner Mark Davis – Stephen R. Sylvanie/USA TODAY Sports
The Raiders under Mark Davis started off rebuilding in 2012, and aside from 2 playoff seasons in 2016(snapping a streak that had lasted since 2003) and 2021, the Raiders have remained rebuilding. Their record under Mark Davis’ 13 years of ownership is a terrible 80-118, plus 0-2 in the playoffs at the time of this writing. By comparison, his father went 136-40 with a Super Bowl victory in the same amount of time.
Every year, it feels like the same thing. The team makes a big move to acquire a big name in their 30s, then makes a questionable first-round draft pick. Everybody laughs at the draft pick as there were better, more obvious draft choices on the board. Raiders fans feel the hype after a good preseason performance, only to fall vastly short of expectations while watching the Kansas City Chiefs dance on their home field.
The problem with the Raiders lies with Mark Davis. He’s the one constant in the chaos that is the Las Vegas Raiders. He hasn’t rotated in and out head coaches to the degree that Al did from 1995-2011, at least not by choice. Remember, he gave Jon Gruden 10 years and $100 million to come out of retirement in 2018. He has pled patience since he took over.
Raiders Owner Mark Davis – Thor Swift/Las Vegas Review-Journal
The problem with the Raiders is that Mark Davis keeps giving power to the wrong people to run the football side of things and then watches as the world burns like he collects money. He knows he doesn’t know much about football, and yet the people he goes to for advice ironically are some of the people from Al’s past.
Former Raiders scout and NFL Hall of Famer Ron Wolf advised him to hire Reggie McKenzie as general manager, and he brought in failed head coach Dennis Allen. Hall of Fame Raiders head coach John Madden advised Davis to hire Jack Del Rio, but as soon as Del Rio lost the locker room in 2017 during the National Anthem protests, Davis turned to longtime best friend Jon Gruden to take over as head coach.
Gruden then jettisoned McKenzie out and infamously hired TV analyst Mike Mayock as general manager until leaked emails forced Gruden to resign just three years into a 10-year contract. Rich Bisaccia guided the team to the playoffs as interim head coach, but a first-round playoff exit after a miracle last season run convinced Davis to fire Mayock and Bisaccia in favor of “The Patriot Way” with Dave Ziegler and Josh McDaniels. That decision was aided by trusting former Raiders scout and Al Davis aide Ken Herock.
It’s not that Mark is trusting guys who don’t know the game of football. He’s asking guys with a wealth of knowledge. The problem is that these guys hadn’t been in charge of football operations for decades. Football is an ever-evolving game. It’s nowhere close to the same game as it was when those guys were active participants in building teams.
What Davis needed to do was talk to guys who are younger and have been involved in the game more recently. If you want to take advice from a younger name who’s still involved with the Raiders, look to somebody like Charles Woodson. He’s a Hall of Famer who retired less than ten years ago and might be able to give you a great idea of who to look to for the next head coach. He recently seems to be recruiting Tom Brady, which, although he’s not a Raider, might be a positive step in the right direction.
One of Al’s biggest flaws near the end was he never seemed to be listening to the guys younger than him; he only wanted to listen to his trusted confidants who had been through the wars with him. He’s not the first person guilty of this, nor will he be the last. But if their way of operations wasn’t working by 2011, it certainly isn’t working in 2023. The Raiders need a fresh voice and somebody else giving advice to Mark rather than the same old guys.
The Davis family has been associated in one way or another with the Raiders since 1963, and maybe it’s time for that association to come to an end.
That sentence was thought unthinkable at one point, but at this point, enough is enough. Allegiant Stadium is constantly swamped by every visiting team, the on-field success hasn’t been there, and now Mark is openly fighting with fans over the lack of success the current regime is having. He looked like a child throwing a temper tantrum in the new video that surfaced from Sunday’s loss to the Chargers.
Mark Davis is the problem with the Raiders. The obvious solution amongst Raider Nation is simple. “Mark Davis needs to just sell the team to somebody who will do this team right and put the right people in place.” But the fact is the Las Vegas Raiders are currently the 6th most profitable team in the NFL. Mark Davis is making absolute bank owning this team. He has no personal incentive to sell the team.
Mark has rejected selling ownership stakes to extremely dignified ownership groups in the past, such as one with Ronnie Lott. He even rejected a potential ownership stake sale to Magic Johnson, a man who has won championships with every single ownership group he has been a part of, including the Dodgers. Now, he owns a stake in the Washington Commanders in the NFL.
The fact is, Raider Nation better get ready. Nothing is going to change anytime soon. Mark Davis is going to own the Raiders likely until his time comes. With no heirs, that’s likely when the team with the team will leave the Davis family.
He’s also likely not to make a move in regards to Josh McDaniels, no matter how badly the team suffers as a result. Last season he kept defending McDaniels by saying things like “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” despite McDaniels taking a playoff team that added future Hall of Fame receiver Devante Adams into the basement after Davis had insisted the team was ready to contend.
These certainly aren’t your father’s or your grandfather’s Raiders. It seems like going to be a long time before we see a true return to the greatness of the Silver & Black.
