It's currently unclear how fans should refer to members of the Las Vegas Raiders who have been a part of multiple different regimes. Are they a select group of fortunate people? Are they just plain lucky? Or are they mere survivors, like cockroaches in an apocalypse?
History says that a person will have better luck leaving this organization than joining it. But the Raiders still field a full 53-man team, an entire coaching and support staff, and a practice squad every year. How many of those people are holdovers from the previous year is bound to be a low number.
How many of those people have been around for several years is even lower. Maxx Crosby is one of the few mainstays, as are Kolton Miller, A.J. Cole, and Daniel Carlson. Other than that, the shelf life for a player, and especially a coach in Las Vegas, is finite. Except for defensive coordinator Pat Graham.
Pete Carroll's firing has to be the last straw for Pat Graham in Las Vegas
Graham originally joined the Silver and Black as a defensive coordinator under Josh McDaniels. When things went sideways, abiding by the "Patriot Way," Mark Davis opted to clean house, firing McDaniels, general manager Dave Ziegler, and a slew of offensive coaches. But not Graham.
Antonio Pierce ended up parlaying his interim gig into the Raiders' full-time head coaching job. Even though Davis let Pierce, a linebackers coach with no previous experience, leapfrog Graham, a longtime coordinator who had been a finalist for other head coaching jobs, Graham stuck around.
After a 4-13 campaign in which the Raiders fired their offensive coordinator, Pierce was kicked to the curb in Las Vegas. Graham, after surviving two rounds of massive layoffs before, was sure to be homeless in the NFL landscape. But Pete Carroll brought him back yet again in 2025.
That made three entirely different head coaches that Graham has served under without even changing his official title a smidge. Carroll's team only won three games this season, however, and they fired two more coordinators during the campaign. But not Graham.
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Carroll himself was fired on Monday, and the organization is now set to hire its fourth coach since Graham's arrival in 2022. It would be an absolute miracle for him to stick around a fourth time, but he has proven to be resilient. Seemingly, nobody has collated the Raiders' lack of success to Graham.
And for good reason. In his four years in Las Vegas, the team has ranked 12th, 23rd, 29th and 32nd in scoring offense. While his unit hasn't been perfect, Graham has largely been saddled by bad quarterback play and an inept offense that simply refuses to play complementary football.
Whereas Graham has done the most that he can with primarily late-round picks and cheap free agent signings, the offense has squandered high draft picks and big-money acquisitions. Whereas Graham has kept the Raiders afloat, the offense has sunk them.
It is unlikely that Graham will stick around in a post-Pete Carroll era in Las Vegas, which is a sentence that would've made Raider Nation's head spin as recently as 2023. But unless someone like Brian Flores comes in, whom Carroll has a relationship with, his admirable tenure in Sin City may be over.