Silver And Black Pride
Every team in the NFL takes on a big risk when it decides to fire its head coach and hire a new one. There’s no way to predict the future, and organizational decision-makers are forced to rely on each candidate’s resume to pick the right one, making it safer to hire someone with experience at the position versus someone with none.
But after hiring a Super Bowl-winner with 18 years of experience as an NFL head coach in Pete Caroll last offseason, only to have a disastrous season and fire him, the Las Vegas Raiders were willing to take a gamble this time around. In the spirit of the city, the Raiders rolled the dice on another former Seattle Seahawks coach, but one that didn’t have any experience in the position he was hired for: Klint Kubiak.
Kubiak has called plays for three different organizations—the Minnesota Vikings, New Orleans Saints and Seahawks—and has been a coach in the league for 12, going on 13 years, but has never been in charge of running the entire operation until OTAs started at the beginning of April.
It’s still early, but the question does arise: What’s the difference between Klint Kubiak the offensive coordinator, and Klint Kubiak the head coach? To get the best answer, the player who knows him the best in Las Vegas’ locker room helped fill in the blanks.
“I may have to tread lightly with the answer,” quarterback Kirk Cousins joked with local reporters after mandatory minicamp on June 9 (h/t ESPN’s Ryan McFadden). “He’s been great. Football matters to him. There’s an intensity there, there’s an attention to detail, there’s an urgency that I’ve sensed from him as a head coach that I think is good for our football team.
“But it does cause me, when I’m driving into work in the morning, I’m kind of like ‘I feel it. I’d better be on today’. I check my watch four times to make sure I’m on time or early because I just feel like he brings that sense of urgency that the great coaches tend to bring, right? And it’s certainly not a laid-back atmosphere, I’ll just say that, and I think that’s a positive, but I think that comes with being a head coach.
“You feel that weight as a head coach, and it’s not an easy position to sit in. It can be lonely at the top, and I think he has to make sure that we’re running a tight ship and that we’re a great operation. We all feel that urgency pre-practice in the locker room, and I think that can be a healthy thing. …It’s not a picnic; we are not just out here having fun. It is work. …Guys are really focused, going over their stuff two or three times because they don’t want to be the guy who made the mental errors. I think that’s a really positive thing, but it’s not a country club.”
Cousins and...
