The Las Vegas Raiders‘ penalty problem is becoming impossible to ignore. Can head coach Klint Kubiak fix the discipline issues before preseason grace runs out?
Two preseason games in, and the pattern is already impossible to ignore: eight penalties against Arizona, nine more against Houston, five of those on special teams alone, and a substitution penalty for the second straight week.
Kubiak spoke on Friday and did what every rookie head coach is coached to do. He ate it. “We put it on ourselves as coaches,” he said. Noble. Also, at some point, an excuse that stops working.
Here’s the strongest pushback, and it’s a fair one: this is preseason, when bloated rosters full of fringe players run scripted reps under a ticking roster cutdown clock, and Kubiak has had exactly one training camp to install an entire operation on a roster he inherited, not built. Blaming a first-year coach for a face mask penalty committed by a cornerback he didn’t draft is lazy analysis dressed up as accountability journalism.
Can Klint Kubiak clean up the mistakes by Week 1?
That argument is compelling, but it fails to withstand scrutiny when examined alongside his own statements. Kubiak wasn’t asked to grade his roster’s talent. He was asked how he coaches penalties out of the group, and his answer was a run on a list of specific, repeated, correctable errors: a back block on Roman Hemby, Decamerion Richardson running out of bounds, a taunting penalty that gifted an opponent a fresh set of downs, a face mask, and, twice in two weeks, a substitution penalty.
Substitution penalties aren’t a talent problem. They’re a communication and personnel management problem, and that lives entirely with the coaching staff’s headset chatter and depth chart clarity. When the same category of mistake repeats in back-to-back weeks, “we’re educating them” stops being a diagnosis and starts being an admission that the fix hasn’t been applied yet.
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Preseason grace has a shelf life, and it expires the moment the games count. The Raiders don’t get to no-decision their way through a 17-game schedule the way they can shrug off a 27-14 exhibition loss to Arizona. Kubiak himself supplied the standard he wants to be judged by. He called two of Friday’s penalties “unacceptable,” not “understandable” or “part of the process.” He’s right to hold that line.
We’ll find out if he’s the real deal…
But a coach who sets that bar in August has to clear it by September. Otherwise the accountability talk curdles into the same coach speak he claims to be allergic to.
This is the test that separates coaches who fix problems from coaches who just narrate them. Kubiak’s few remaining weeks need to show the fix, not another postgame acknowledgment.
So which is it? Is this a first-year coach installing a system that will look unrecognizable by Week 1? Or is this the early tape of a discipline problem that’s going to define his tenure? And if the Raiders open the regular season with a special teams penalty in the first quarter, does Kubiak still get the benefit of the doubt?
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