Klint Kubiak has said all the right things since taking over the Las Vegas Raiders. With training camp underway, it’s time to turn his vision into results.
Kubiak has a phrase he wants gone from the Raiders’ vocabulary: “I.” He said it unprompted, on the first day of his first training camp as an NFL head coach, and he said it like a man who has rehearsed it more than once. “We talked about it all offseason,” Kubiak said, “but removing the word ‘I’ from our verbiage as much as possible and thinking about the team.”
It’s a fine sentiment. It is also, at this point, a cliché so worn into the fabric of coaching press conferences that it barely registers as a philosophy anymore. Every first-year head coach in every sport says some version of it in his opening week. The question that actually matters for Las Vegas isn’t whether Kubiak believes in team-first culture. It’s whether he can build a roster, a scheme, and a quarterback room good enough for that culture to matter.
On that front, Tuesday’s session with reporters offered a coach who is saying mostly the right things and a team with more open questions than settled answers.
There’s no QB competition…
Start with the quarterback situation, because it’s the story that will define this franchise’s season, and maybe Kubiak’s tenure with it.
Kirk Cousins is QB1, and Kubiak isn’t dancing around it. “When we go out to practice tomorrow, Kirk Cousins is the starting quarterback,” he said. “He’s the guy, and he’s going to get a ton of reps. He deserves them because he’s played really good football.” Fair enough. But Fernando Mendoza, the No. 1 overall pick, is standing right behind him, and the way Kubiak talks about evaluating him is telling. He’s not leaning on completion percentage or box scores. He wants to know if Mendoza makes the same mistake twice, what his attitude looks like after a bad rep, and how he carries himself when things go sideways.
That’s a smart, mature way to judge a rookie quarterback. It’s also a tell. Whether Kubiak means to or not, he’s describing a competition, not a mentorship arrangement with a scoreboard bolted on.
He said it himself, plainly enough: “For every position there’s got to be competition, right? The best player has to play.” And that’s the tension nobody’s resolving with a press conference answer. Cousins is “the guy,” but he’s also the guy Kubiak wants Mendoza and Aidan O’Connell pushing every single day. Both things can be true in July. They can’t both be true in November. Somebody wins that argument, probably by October, and Raiders fans deserve more than the vocabulary Kubiak’s using to describe it while the answer still feels comfortable. They deserve to know he actually has a plan for the day.
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Health is the biggest story for the Raiders
Then there’s health. Jermod McCoy hasn’t played football in a year and is being eased back in on what Kubiak called “a moving target.” Maxx Crosby, arguably the most important defensive player on the roster, missed significant time in the spring and is now expected to take “all the reps” in a practice capped at 90 minutes because of the Nevada heat.
Both plans sound reasonable in isolation. Together, they describe a team hoping a lot of things go right in a division where they usually don’t. Kubiak’s answer on managing his stars, “We’re aware of that, but he’s ready to go practice tomorrow,” is the kind of quote that ages well if McCoy and Crosby stay healthy through September and ages very badly if they don’t.
Las Vegas finally has competent coaching staff…
What should give Raiders fans some genuine reason for optimism is the structural stuff, the parts of camp that don’t make headlines but tend to predict outcomes. Kubiak leaned hard on the experience around him: Mike McCoy, Joe DeCamillis, and Rick Dennison, a staff with real mileage, not a collection of first-timers learning together.
He talked about using afternoon walkthroughs and iPad-delivered film to compensate for early practice starts that don’t allow for morning meetings, a logistical wrinkle most fans never think about, solved with the kind of unglamorous planning that actually wins football games in November.
And his answer on the offensive line, that “the best athlete isn’t the one that’s going to win the job,” that it’s “the guy that plays the best with the other five around him,” is exactly the sort of scheme-first, ego-last thinking that separates competent staffs from chaotic ones.
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None of this means Kubiak is destined to fail, and none of it means the “team first” talk is empty. Coaches who obsess over hydration schedules and versatile linemen tend to be building something real, even if the vocabulary sounds recycled. But talk is the easy part of training camp. Fernando Mendoza’s growth curve, Crosby and McCoy’s bodies, and the eventual resolution of a quarterback competition that Kubiak insists is real—those are the things that will actually tell Raiders fans whether their new head coach can turn a good first impression into a good football team. Camp is where the answers start.
*Top Photo: Ramble Illustration/Getty Images