The Las Vegas Raiders‘ tradition remains alive under Mark Davis, but celebrating the past means little if accountability never follows disappointing results.
By now, Mark Davis has the training camp monologue down cold. The ballboy summers at El Rancho Tropicana. The post routes against Willie Brown. The easy laugh when he clarifies, gently, that no, he didn’t actually beat one of the greatest cornerbacks of all time; Brown just let him have it. It’s a good story, which Davis tells well. He has told it, in one form or another, for most of his 15 years running the franchise his father built.
The trouble is what comes after all of the nostalgia.
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In a wide-ranging sit-down with Paul Gutierrez of the team’s official site, Davis pivoted from those memories to Maxx Crosby, to a healthy-looking Kirk Cousins, to the kicking battle, to the “phenomenal” pairing of general manager John Spytek and rookie coach Klint Kubiak. All fine, all optimistic, all the things an owner is supposed to say in August. Then came the line that actually matters.
“Football is cyclical and linear,” Davis said. “Every year is a new year, but the past 40-plus years, we haven’t achieved the goals we’re after.”
That is, in its way, an honest admission. It’s probably the most sincere thing that Davis has said in a while.
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It’s also a remarkably tidy way to describe four decades without a Super Bowl, two playoff appearances since the 2002 season, and a franchise that has cycled through coaches and systems and cities without ever quite finding its footing. “Cyclical” is a word for something that comes back around on its own. It is not a word that requires anyone to be held accountable for why it hasn’t.
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Davis followed it with the sort of line that plays well in a locker room and less well under scrutiny: that this is a “we” thing, not a “me” thing. It’s true, in the literal sense, that football is a team sport. But the buck-passing has a familiar shape by now. Fifteen years in charge is long enough that the “we” includes plenty of hires, extensions and second chances that were his to give or withhold. The Raiders’ record under his ownership isn’t something that just happened to him.
None of that erases what he’s building this time. Spytek and Kubiak represent a real structural bet, and there’s a version of this roster, with Brock Bowers, Ashton Jeanty and a healthy Crosby, that has a foundation worth being patient with. Davis is right that patience and roster-building take time.
Nonetheless, patience is a virtue that gets harder to extend to an owner who has already had fifteen years and a standing excuse for why none of them worked out.
Davis says this year feels good. He’s said some version of that before. At some point, the ballboy stories and the coaching hires stop being enough on their own, and the only story that will actually change the narrative is the one written in January.
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