Former Las Vegas Raiders general manager Mike Mayock thinks the Raiders could have had something special after their playoff berth in the 2021-2022 season.
During that season, the Raiders started 3-2 before head coach Jon Gruden resigned after articles published by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times detailed the use of racist, homophobic and misogynistic terms by Gruden in emails reportedly dating back to 2010.
The team then promoted Rich Bisaccia to become the interim head coach, who steadied the ship and led the Raiders to the playoffs. Mayock believes the job Bisaccia did as an interim coach warranted him to be hired full time during a recent appearance on OutKick’s "Don’t @ Me With Dan Dakich."
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"I’m entitled to my opinion, and I believe that Raiders team would have been a high-level playoff team the last couple of years had they kept Rich Bisaccia on board," Mayock said.
"The players gravitate to [Bisaccia] not because he’s easy on them, but because he has their backs at all times, and he loves them just as much off the field as he does on the field. He’s one of the few coaches I’ve ever seen that can kick a guy's a-- for three hours, and that guy will be in his office afterward talking about issues with his girlfriend," Mayock said.
Mayock spoke about how Bisaccia led the Raiders organization through some emotionally challenging moments during that tumultuous 2021 season.
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"We’re 5-2 with Richie, and we have a bye week. We go on the bye week, we come back, we’re healthy, we’re excited, we got the right guy as our head coach, and that’s the week that Henry Ruggs got in the car accident and killed a woman and her dog, and that put an emotional hole in our building that few coaches can come back from," Mayock said.
"We had survived the Gruden thing, now we’ve got the Henry Ruggs situation. We go into to play a horrible New York Giants team, and we lose. And we lost, I think, four of our next five because guys are processing and dealing with one of the worst things in their lives," Mayock continued.
"They all loved Henry Ruggs, and that situation was awful. Yet somehow Richie kept us in the game, we win the last four. … We go 10-7, and we take the Bengals in the wild card game all the way to the final play of the game; and they go on to the Super Bowl," the former general manager added.
Despite the Raiders' success down the stretch that earned them a playoff berth, the Raiders went in a different direction in the offseason.
"We thought we had something special. We were a young, aggressive, tough team, Richie is a great natural leader, and we thought we had something to build on. The net of it is that Mark Davis wanted a new coach, he wanted a new GM, he fired Richie and I. I told the owner that Rich Bisaccia has got to be our coach, he’s our guy. I got fired, Rich got fired, and he hired the two people from New England, [Josh] McDaniels and [Dave] Ziegler," Mayock said.
After Mayock and Bisaccia left, McDaniels went 9-16 over 25 games with the Raiders and was fired after Week 8 during his second season.
Ziegler was fired after two seasons with the team, and the Raiders hired former Los Angeles Chargers general manager Tom Telesco as their new general manager.
After firing McDaniels, the Raiders promoted Antonio Pierce as interim head coach. This time around, Davis hired his interim coach as the full-time head coach after Pierce went 5-4 to finish the season.
The Raiders did not make the playoffs in either of the two seasons after Bisaccia’s departure and are currently 1-2 this season.
The Raiders' quest to return to the playoffs continues when they play the Cleveland Browns on Sunday.
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