Why Raiders Players Hated Josh McDaniels So Much He Was Gone By Morning

Josh McDaniels’ phone sat silent on his nightstand. Inside the Las Vegas Raiders’ offices, someone had already decided his fate — they just hadn’t told him yet. On Halloween night 2023, he went to bed still thinking he was the team’s head coach. He had six Super Bowl rings and a six-year deal. He had 157 total offensive yards in his final game, a 26-14 loss to Detroit on Monday Night Football that left the building silent. By morning, a flood of missed calls and texts told him everything.

Loaded Before

The collapse didn’t start with the Lions game. McDaniels’ Raiders opened his tenure 0-3, including blowing a 20-point lead to Arizona, the largest blown lead in franchise history. He traded two draft picks for Davante Adams. He replaced Derek Carr with Jimmy Garoppolo. Every aggressive move was supposed to accelerate a contender. Instead, his Year 2 offense averaged 15.8 points per game and 268.3 yards per game, eclipsing 20 points exactly once. That’s not a slump. That’s a program producing at half the rate of a functional NFL offense.

Secret Meetings

Most people assumed McDaniels simply lost games. The truth ran deeper. Raiders offensive linemen started meeting without coaches to design their own blocking schemes because they no longer trusted the staff calling plays. On October 26, four days before the firing, McDaniels yielded the floor in a team meeting so players could voice frustrations directly. A full roster airing grievances to the head coach’s face. One source put it plainly: “It was clear the players and fans did not like him at the helm.” The locker room had already fired him.

The Pattern

McDaniels had seen this movie before. In Denver, he went 11-17 over parts of two seasons, traded away Jay Cutler, fractured player relationships, and got fired. Afterward, he admitted it publicly: “I didn’t really know people and how important that aspect of this process and maintaining the culture and building the team was. I failed, and I didn’t succeed at it.” Then he walked into Las Vegas and recreated the identical disaster. Same cultural collapse, same player revolt and, same mid-season exit. A decade apart, nothing changed.

The Wiring

ESPN’s Bill Barnwell ranked the McDaniels hire 32nd out of 37 head coaching hires since 2021, the worst among three fired Raiders coaches. But the ranking misses the mechanism. McDaniels’ five offensive coordinator stints outside the Belichick/Patriots system all finished in the bottom half of the league in efficiency. He thrives inside a specific structure: a dominant head coach who handles culture while McDaniels handles X’s and O’s. Remove that structure, hand him the keys, and the machine eats itself. Every single time.

Proof of Concept

The 2025 New England Patriots went 14-3 under Mike Vrabel with McDaniels calling plays. Drake Maye led the NFL in Total QBR at 77.2, completion percentage at 72%, and yards per attempt at 8.9. The offense averaged 28.8 points per game. That’s an 81% scoring increase over McDaniels’ final Raiders output. Same brain. Same playbook philosophy. Completely different results. Vrabel handled the locker room. McDaniels handled the whiteboard. The Patriots’ turnaround from 4-13 the prior year tied for the best single-season improvement in NFL history.

The Wreckage

McDaniels left Las Vegas holding a lit match. The franchise has now cycled through six head coaches: Gruden, Bisaccia, McDaniels, Pierce, Carroll, and Kubiak. The Davante Adams trade became a net loss. The Derek Carr replacement strategy collapsed. The 2025 Raiders finished 3-14 and earned the No. 1 overall pick, still cleaning up personnel decisions McDaniels and GM Dave Ziegler made years earlier. One man’s 20-game tenure poisoned the roster construction for multiple seasons. Maxx Crosby has now played for six different head coaches.

The Rule

This stopped being about one coach a long time ago. McDaniels backed out of the Indianapolis Colts head coaching job in February 2018, hours before his introductory press conference. He failed in Denver. He failed in Las Vegas. He thrived under Belichick. He thrived under Vrabel. The pattern is now a rule: brilliant coordinators do not automatically scale into head coaches. Culture management and play design are separate skill sets. McDaniels proved it twice, at the cost of two franchises and roughly 33 lost games.

The Trap

McDaniels knows all of this. He told the Review Journal he harbors “no ill will toward any of the things that haven’t worked out in my career.” He said he learns more from failure than success. That self-awareness sounds like growth. It also sounds exactly like what he said after Denver, right before he walked into Vegas and burned it down again. Some desperate franchise will watch the 2025 Patriots film, see the 28.8 points per game, and offer McDaniels a head coaching job. The cycle has a gravitational pull.

The Upgrade

The next time someone tells you a great coordinator deserves a head coaching shot, remember the number: 20-33. That’s McDaniels’ combined record as a head coach across two franchises and parts of four seasons. Then remember 14-3, which is what happened the moment someone gave him the coordinator title and nothing more. The man who couldn’t keep a locker room for two years just orchestrated one of the greatest offensive seasons in Patriots history. Some people are built to design the machine, not run the factory.

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