After Sunday’s 41-24 loss at the Cincinnati Bengals, Las Vegas Raiders head coach Antonio Pierce hit a consistent note during his postgame remarks: It’s time for the Raiders to hit the reset button.
“Today wasn’t a good day in the office. Got the bye week to reset. Need to look at everything, and when I say everything, everything,” Pierce said.
The Raiders (2-7) didn’t wait long to slam down that reset button either. News broke late Sunday night that the Raiders had canned offensive coordinator Luke Getsy, quarterbacks coach Rich Scangarello and offensive line coach James Cregg.
Pierce had been asked in his postgame media availability following the loss to the Bengals if changes were coming.
“I’ve got to use the bye week to look at everything,” Pierce said.
That sounds about right after Las Vegas endured Cincinnati scoring on each of its first five offensive possessions and totaling 373 yards of offense. Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow threw for a career-high tying five touchdown passes against the Raiders.
Meanwhile, offensively, the Raiders benched quarterback Gardner Minshew in favor of former Atlanta Falcon and Arizona Cardinal Desmond Ridder midway through the third quarter. That duo combined for a pair of giveaways and directed Vegas to just 217 yards of offense and 3.7 yards per play.
To Minshew and Ridder’s credit, each directed the Raiders to one touchdown drive.
Afterwards, Pierce couldn’t point his finger to anything in particular that led to things getting so out of hand.
“No. That wasn’t a good enough effort obviously. Score tells you that. It looked like that the entire game except for probably the first quarter. But again, going to have to reset over the bye week. Got enough time to sit there and really, really dive into what we can do to fix this because it can’t continue,” Pierce said.
As the Raiders enter their bye week, Las Vegas is riding a five-game losing streak. Pierce shared what his message to the team will be as the Raiders look to correct things in the season’s second half.
“Yeah, we’ve got to reset. It goes for all of us. It’s a group effort, it’s a team effort. We’ve all got to find a way to do better. We’re going to pinpoint from this game and look at a lot of things from coaches, to play calling, to players, to execution, to situations that we all can do a much better job and put ourselves in position to get into the fourth quarter and actually have a chance to win and not be always playing catchup,” Pierce said.
The Raiders return to action with a trip to the Miami Dolphins on Sunday, Nov. 17 with kickoff set for 10 a.m. PT and the game to be televised on CBS.
