Rob Leonard has plenty of mountains to climb in his first season as the Las Vegas Raiders‘ defensive coordinator, and Thursday’s 27-14 preseason-opening loss to the Arizona Cardinals offered a glimpse of the arduous journey ahead for him and his assistant coaches.
Chief among the rookie defensive coordinator’s challenges: missed tackles. The problem has plagued the Silver and Black long before Leonard joined the Raiders’ coaching staff in 2022 as defensive line coach. Over the past five seasons, Las Vegas has been a habitual cellar dweller in the missed-tackles department—or, to flip the ranking, a perennial Top 10, if not Top 5, member of that dubious club.
From 2021 to 2025, there was only one season the Raiders weren’t at the bottom: 2022, when the team had 69 missed tackles and was ranked 15th in the league. The following three seasons told a different story—the Raiders ranked in the bottom 10 in 2023, were the third-worst tackling defense in 2024, and were the fourth-worst in 2025.
“No sh*t, Sherlock.”
It’s no surprise, then, that when I’ve floated the “the Raiders need to improve tackling” line, that notion is met with a “no sh**t, Sherlock” reaction 99.9% of the time. But as Captain Obvious as stating “fix tackling” may be, the exhibition game against the Cardinals showed the good, the bad and the ugly of the Raiders’ ability to securely wrap up and bring ball carriers and pass-catchers to the ground.
“Yeah, third down was not good enough last night in that first half. And when you’re not—I thought Arizona did a really good job too of attacking man coverage—and they made some plays on the ball, so the coverage and the pass rush has to work together, and we’ll continue to improve it,” Raiders head coach Klint Kubiak said in the postgame news conference after the preseason opener.
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The whiffs that have become synonymous with Las Vegas’ defense were on display for all to see. So were sound tackling techniques—proof it wasn’t all atrocious.
Still, Kubiak struck a pragmatic tone Sunday when discussing the team’s overall performance. “Just as a team, we’ve got to improve,” he said during his media availability. “There’s a lot of improvement, offense, defense, and special teams. There are things that I liked, and there are things where we’ve got to get better. We put a lot of time into that yesterday, and we all know again it is our fourth week of training camp. We are a team that’s still gelling together.”
Kubiak emphatically hit the nail on the head there.
Like Leonard, Kubiak is an NFL neophyte, and while he’s renowned for stressing and teaching attention to detail, the preseason clash with the Cardinals was the Raiders’ first outing against an opponent in a different uniform. Growing pains will be a recurring topic for Kubiak’s Raiders in Year 1 and beyond—that’s simply the nature of the game.
Veteran defensive tackle Adam Butler—a 32-year-old entering his ninth NFL season (fourth with the Raiders)—took a level-headed approach as the Raiders continue training camp practices.
“To be honest, I’ve been through a lot of these preseason things, and you can never really tell off the first game,” Butler said. “A lot of young guys played. I saw great effort, but I guess I’ll have more of an opinion as the preseason progresses.”
Like his head coach, Butler is also looking forward to joint practices with the Houston Texans in the Lone Star State, which lead up to both teams’ preseason clash Thursday. That’s where the Raiders will find out whether they turned the tough lessons learned in preseason game one into all-important improvement against Houston.
“You get a lot more out of it because going against our team, our team does one thing, but somebody else does another,” Butler said of what can come from joint practices with another team. “Especially in the beginning weeks of training camp, you normally get just one look. Every team has their own different style and their own different schemes and stuff like that, and you have to adjust your game. You have to adjust your techniques to accommodate whatever schemes that they run. And it’s very beneficial to get those different looks. I’m excited.”
At some point, the Raiders themselves must look different.
No more whiffs, mistakes and ugliness from the defensive side of the ball. Of course, the offense and special teams aren’t immune to this, either—there were encouraging moments from those two units against Arizona, as well as some facepalm instances.
It is still uncertain how many snaps, if any, players will receive in the final two preseason games, the last of which is a contest against the San Francisco 49ers on Thursday, Aug. 27, before the regular season begins. That opener comes at home on Sunday, Sept. 13, when the Raiders host the Miami Dolphins for a 1:25 p.m. PDT kickoff.
Leave it to Butler to identify the biggest steps the defense needs to take this preseason.
“I would say just making sure that we lock in the basic framework of a defense. Making sure that we set a consistent edge. Making sure that we communicate the way we need to communicate and just continue to emphasize how important that is,” Butler said. “Because when guys aren’t on the same page, it shows up, and we don’t want to get exposed. We want to be on the same page. We want to know what we’re doing, and we want to make sure that we have the basic fundamentals down first before anything else.”
Like anything with the Raiders—or the NFL in general—it’s easier said than done.
*Top Photo: David Becker/Getty Images