The Las Vegas Raiders hired Pete Carroll this offseason to both rebuild the team's culture and compete right away. That experiment has brutally failed through seven games of the 2025 NFL season, as the team has experienced just as many 30+ point blowout losses as they have wins.
With an aging coach like Carroll, finding a successor is paramount. After all, Carroll is already the oldest coach in NFL history, and he'd be firmly in his late 70s if he finished his entire contract in Las Vegas. But the Raiders have no viable in-house candidates who could be the heir to the throne.
Of course, both the fan base and franchise thought they had more time to answer this looming question, but the team's immediate struggles have sped up the timeline. A recent report actually indicated that the Raiders may have had a plan in place, but got brutally rejected.
Raiders whiffing on Robert Saleh is the ultimate slap in the face to the organization
On Friday, The Athletic's Michael Silver wrote a piece about San Francisco 49ers defensive coordinator Robert Saleh, whom Las Vegas interviewed to be their head coach this offseason. Silver added a note that is simply embarrassing for the Raiders and their fan base.
"Saleh was even more in demand last January as a potential defensive coordinator, but he made it clear that if he didn’t get a head coaching job, he was overwhelmingly partial to returning to the 49ers," Silver wrote. "That conviction held even when the Raiders, after hiring 73-year-old Pete Carroll, offered Saleh a record-breaking contract to become the team’s defensive coordinator, with the understanding that he’d be in line to succeed Carroll as head coach."
Yes, Saleh has a history with the 49ers, but his turning down the Raiders when they offered him an unbelievable mountain of cash and a surefire head coaching position within the next few years says everything about the current state of the organization.
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Saleh, who largely failed as the head coach of the New York Jets, probably feels like he has just one more chance to become an NFL head coach. It seems like he would rather make less money and hedge his bets by working for the 49ers and try to strike a head coach position elsewhere.
In fairness to Saleh, Las Vegas has not been a desirable place for coaches to go. The franchise is on its fifth head coach in as many years, and the team has struggled for the better part of two decades, so it is a pretty big bet on oneself to believe that they can get the organization out of this terrible funk.
However, most NFL teams could lure a coach in with either money or the promise of a bigger and more important role in the relatively immediate future. But Saleh turned down both of these things from the Raiders to preserve his career, which is crushing.
It is also interesting to learn that Carroll did not initially want Patrick Graham to return as the defensive coordinator in Las Vegas. Mark Davis and Tom Brady clearly wanted Ben Johnson instead of Carroll, and Carroll clearly wanted Saleh instead of Graham, but the Raiders never get their first choice.