As bad as the 2025 NFL season has gone for the Las Vegas Raiders, every time head coach Pete Carroll speaks to the media, he seems to make things worse. Perhaps the fan base has simply grown tired of the coach and gives him no benefit of the doubt, which is a hard thing to do in a 2-12 year.
But there is also something to be said for the fact that his undying optimism doesn't exactly resonate with the Raiders being so down in the dumps like this. In the offseason, it was endearing and promising. But staring down a 1-15 finish to the year, it just reeks of him being a bit out of touch.
Following Las Vegas' Week 15 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles, Carroll already told reporters that the only good thing to come from Sunday's game was that nobody got hurt. Sheesh. But the veteran head coach didn't exactly make things better when he took the podium on Monday, either.
Pete Carroll said all the wrong things (again) after Raiders' loss to Eagles
After telling reporters that he simply wants to see progress for the remainder of the year, which is admirable and realistic, and that both he and the team are frustrated, Carroll was asked about whether or not he feels that he is coaching for his job in the final three games of the season.
"No, I don't feel like that at all. I really don't. I'm well beyond that. I don't feel like that," Carroll said.
When you have a 2-12 record, an 0-5 mark in the AFC West, and you've been blown out in nine of your 14 games, it is probably not good to tell the public that you believe you are "well beyond" coaching for your job. If he believes that, then he is definitely out of touch. If he's lying, that's a separate thing.
Neither of those is good, however. Carroll was asked the necessary follow-up question to that, which is whether or not he was willing to oversee what is likely to be a rebuild in Las Vegas this offseason. The veteran head coach, despite not building for the future this season, said he would be.
"Well, it's looking like that's what's necessary. We need to keep working to get better, and that's in all areas, all aspects of what we're doing," Carroll said. "I came in here thinking we were gonna turn it right away. I really did anticipate doing that. But that's not what's taken place, unfortunately."
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Duh. Carroll, every week, sits in front of the team's reporters and laments about the season and the Raiders' record. He cannot help himself from being publicly baffled about how things are as bad as they are. Every week, multiple times a week, he speaks at press conferences as if he is shell-shocked.
Finally, one reporter asked Carroll how they were so far off in their judgment of this football team. Was it poor talent evaluation?
"Blindly optimistic as I am, I thought we would come in here, and we would have a big factor on this club, and we would be able to find success that we would be proud of, and right now, it doesn't feel like that," Carroll said.
Is Carroll admitting here that he went into the season blindly with no plan? Certainly not. But what he is subtly telling reporters, without realizing it, is that he was just flat-out wrong about this Raiders team, and he hasn't been able to recover from his initially incorrect evaluations. That is a problem.
Carroll then went on to say that he has no experiences like this in his long coaching career to learn from, effectively saying that this is tabula rasa for the 74-year-old. He also reaffirmed his desire to return next year by promising that the Raiders are "just getting started."
While these certainly weren't the worst individual comments that Carroll has made this season, when all mashed together into one press conference, it is hard to imagine him bombing things worse than he just did.
He told fans that he was above thinking about his job security and admitted that this team needs a rebuild while also accidentally admitting that he let his optimism cloud his evaluation of this team from the jump. The aging coach has never been in this bad a situation, but he also wants to return.
Not a great day at the podium for Carroll. Not a great weekend for Carroll, either. Hopefully, this is all winding down very soon because Raider Nation is tired of hearing the same old things at press conferences from their head coach, who is clearly out of answers, if he ever had any in the first place.