Kubiak Ditches Super Bowl Champs For NFL’s Worst Team Just Hours After Title Win

The Raiders have cycled through six head coaches since 2021 – roughly one per season – this is what Kubiak is walking into. Jon Gruden resigned amid a league-wide email scandal. Rich Bisaccia went 7-5 as interim and got replaced anyway. Josh McDaniels was infamous for blowing big leads. Antonio Pierce went 4-13. And Pete Carroll — a Super Bowl-winning coach himself, 74 years old and determined to prove he could still do it — lasted one season and went 3-14, losing by double digits nine times and getting held to fewer than 10 points five times. Carroll fired special teams coordinator Tom McMahon and offensive coordinator Chip Kelly midseason, 16 days apart, in an effort to right the ship. Nothing worked. That’s not a coaching carousel. That’s a coaching meat grinder. And Kubiak, 38 years old, just volunteered to climb in.

What He’s Leaving Behind

This wasn’t some middling coordinator taking a lateral move. Under Kubiak, Seattle’s offense ranked third in scoring at 28.4 points per game, eighth in total yards at 351.4 per game, and eighth in passing yards at 228.1. The Seahawks also tied for 10th in rushing at 123.3 yards per game and ranked 13th in offensive efficiency. That balance powered Seattle through a postseason run that included wins over the 49ers and the Rams, culminating in the Super Bowl demolition of New England. Jaxon Smith-Njigba, who emerged as one of the league’s most dangerous receivers this season, didn’t hold back: “They’re getting someone special, someone who knows the game, someone who’s going to do whatever it takes to win. He’s an unbelievable coach.”

The Darnold Resurrection 

Kubiak’s real selling point isn’t a playbook. It’s what he did with Sam Darnold. The former No. 3 overall pick had been written off by the Jets and Panthers, bounced to San Francisco — where Kubiak served as the passing game specialist in 2023 and started putting pieces back together. That connection planted the seeds for Darnold’s breakout with Minnesota in 2024. Then Kubiak and Darnold reunited in Seattle, and the result was a 14-3 regular season, three postseason victories, and a Lombardi Trophy. Darnold himself, still buzzing from the championship, kept it simple: “Klint’s the man. He’s a great person and a really smart guy. I think he’s going to do great things in Vegas.” The Raiders aren’t hiring a coach. They’re hiring the guy who turned a bust into a Super Bowl champion, and they’re betting he can do it again with a rookie.

$91 Million and the Keys to the Kingdom

The resources waiting in Vegas would make any first-time head coach’s hands shake. The Raiders hold the No. 1 overall pick in the 2026 draft and nearly $90 million in salary cap space. “We have capital,” GM John Spytek told reporters during the coaching search. “We have one of the greatest buildings, if not the greatest building, in the NFL. There’s a lot to be excited about here.” The expected No. 1 pick is Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza, who won the Heisman Trophy and led the Hoosiers to a 16-0 season and the national championship. In three College Football Playoff games, Mendoza threw for 555 yards on 47-of-63 passing and eight touchdowns in wins over Alabama, Oregon, and Miami, capped by a fourth-down, 12-yard touchdown run with 9:18 to go in the fourth quarter of the title game that turned out to be the decisive score. Add in tight end Brock Bowers and running back Ashton Jeanty, and Kubiak isn’t walking into a wasteland. The lumber is stacked. Someone just needs to build.

A Football Dynasty Wired Into His DNA

Klint’s father, Gary, coached the Denver Broncos to a Super Bowl title in the 2015 season, making the Kubiaks one of only a handful of father-son duos to have both served as NFL head coaches. Gary’s coaching roots trace back to Mike Shanahan’s dynasty — the two won back-to-back Super Bowls together in Denver in 1997 and 1998 — and Kyle Shanahan, now running the 49ers, got his start under Gary’s watch. Gary spent his playing career as John Elway’s backup quarterback in Denver before transitioning to coaching. Twelve seasons of climbing the ladder, each one inside a system rooted in his father’s principles.

The Drought That Haunts Everything

The Raiders haven’t won a playoff game since the 2002 season, when the then-Oakland Raiders played in the Super Bowl. They’ve reached the postseason exactly twice in that span, most recently in 2021. Three Lombardi Trophies sit inside the facility in Henderson, relics from another century. And the city is starting to notice. The split between supporters at Allegiant Stadium is close to 50-50, even when a visiting team draws a crowd. But the Broncos might as well have been playing at Empower Field at Mile High with all the orange in the stands in their December 7 meeting, and there were plenty of empty seats for the final two games against the Giants and Chiefs. The Raiders are running out of time to matter in their own town.

Tom Brady Is Pulling Strings Now

Minority owner Tom Brady helped lead this coaching search alongside Spytek, and his fingerprints are all over the direction. Owner Mark Davis said in a statement that Brady and Spytek would “guide football decisions with a shared focus on leadership, culture, and alignment with the organization’s long-term vision and goals.” Spytek framed the stakes clearly: “Are there two more important hires in an organization than a quarterback and a head coach? I think we probably all would agree that those two men usually steer the ship, and that’s out in front of us right now.” If Kubiak develops Mendoza into a franchise quarterback and turns the Raiders competitive, Brady’s credibility as a football executive becomes legitimate overnight. If it falls apart, it’s another chapter in the same tired story and Brady owns a piece of it this time.

The Patience Problem

Six head coaches since 2021 tell you everything about the organizational culture Kubiak just inherited. Carroll got one year. Pierce got one year. McDaniels barely got a season and a half. The 2025 Raiders ranked last in every major offensive category, including rushing yards per game at 77.5. Geno Smith, brought in via trade to be Carroll’s quarterback, never lived up to expectations, throwing for 3,025 yards, 19 touchdowns, and a league-high 17 interceptions. Defensively, the Raiders were 25th in points allowed at 25.4 per game. As Brendan Bussmann, managing partner of B Global, a Las Vegas-based international consulting firm, told the AP: “Vegas wants to win. When the product doesn’t match it, that’s where you bring in a bunch of people that, while we appreciate their dollars and visiting our city, we’d rather have them visit our city and not be in our stadium.” Kubiak has every tool a coach could ask for. What he doesn’t have is any guarantee he’ll get more than twelve months to use them.

Can Lightning Strike Twice?

Everything comes back to one question: Can Kubiak do for Fernando Mendoza what he did for Sam Darnold? Take a Heisman-winning arm out of Indiana, plug him into a timing-based system built on play-action and rhythm throws, and turn a 3-14 franchise into something worth watching before the organization loses patience again. He has the draft capital, the cap space, the offensive weapons, and a football bloodline that stretches back decades. What he’s missing is proof that any of it works without Darnold and a front office willing to let a plan actually breathe. The last coach to survive more than two seasons in Las Vegas was Jon Gruden, and that ended in scandal. The confetti from Super Bowl LX is still being swept up in Santa Clara. Across the desert in Las Vegas, they’re already hanging a new nameplate on the office door and hoping, for once, it stays up longer than a year.

Sources:
Klint Kubiak ‘fired up’ about taking Raiders’ coaching job — ESPN
Raiders fire Pete Carroll after one season; GM John Spytek remains — ESPN
Raiders coaching search critical in busy Las Vegas market with No. 1 pick, $90M in cap space — KNPR/Associated Press
Mendoza Becomes 18th Heisman Winner To Capture National Championship — Heisman.com
Klint Kubiak coaching biography — Pro Football History