Hopefully this is the last Josh McDaniels article for a while, because I’m pretty much sick of the guy at this point. But this is too funny not to document. The Las Vegas Raiders fired McDaniels last week, and now more details are emerging from just how comically bad it got behind the scenes.
First off, we had McDaniels meet with players, where they proceeded to tell him how horrible he is at his job and in his capacity to lead men. He proceeded to reportedly become, “a shell” of his typical tyrannical self. This coming from NFL Media insider Ian Rapoport.
Key excerpt here from Rapaport’s report (always feels cathartic to put that surname and that next word together):
Another source close to McDaniels described him during Thursday’s practice as someone trying to listen to the players, not over-coaching, playing some music and letting it play out. McDaniels was trying to do what they asked during the meeting. But the contrast in his behavior was so stark that one person present said he felt McDaniels wasn’t really there.
In other words, McDaniels was somewhere between having a full-blown identity crisis in real time, and/or he went into the tank and gave his team the coaching practice equivalent of the cold-shoulder/silent treatment. That’s how I interpret that information, based on what is widely known about McDaniels from a distance. Think about how bad it had to be for Raiders players to actually deal with on a daily basis.
Oh but wait. There’s more!
Please ignore the fact that Fox Sports’ Jay Glazer called him “John McDaniels” in this X post. Make the main thing the main thing. Drink in how threatened McDaniels felt by his eventual interim replacement, Antonio Pierce, when the ex-star linebacker addressed the team days before McDaniels got axed.
Alright fine I’ll transcribe the key part of it (using dots to skip ahead for concision/clarity):
“[Pierce] brought up the old Giants team that beat the Patriots…in the Super Bowl in the 2007 season. He said, ‘No matter who we played, we thought we could beat them.’ We had a game plan that we could beat them…We have to believe it here with the Raiders, we can beat anybody.
“[…] He finishes up that speech, everybody thinks they’re great — except for Josh McDaniels. Josh McDaniels then goes over to him and says, ‘Don’t ever talk about the Patriots like that.’ And then you really saw how divided that building got.”
The absolute one-man f*cking clown show that Josh McDaniels is. Am I right?
If there are any remaining McDaniels supporters out there, my question to you would be, “Why?” and your question to me might be something like, “Why do you relentlessly bash this guy and kick him while he’s down!? YOU’RE MEAN.”
Well it’s because I have such a low tolerance for fake tough guys who try to act hard, condescend to damn near everyone around them, and have such unfounded superiority complexes. The planet can barely hold the size of Josh McDaniels’ ego. He’s so out of touch with who he even is as a human being that he projects that frustration onto everyone around him. Toxicity personified.
You feel like a big man yelling like that all the time, Joshy? Harder for that sh*t to slide when Tom Brady isn’t there to bail you out.
Now I gotta wonder how many times Brady checked into the right play in critical situations to make McDaniels look good. It has to be a significant fraction of the time, right?
No denying McDaniels knows how to scheme offensive football better than most in his profession. When it comes to connecting with others and building genuine relationships as a head coach, you could argue nobody in NFL history has been worse or more rapidly alienating than him.
When everyone in the Raiders locker room was crying out for him to change, McDaniels shut down. When he had one of his assistants speak on his behalf because he was too mentally weak /lacked the people-skills wherewithal to do so, he berated him for something that has literally nothing to do with the situation at hand.
Josh McDaniels should be banished to Football Siberia. He’s a proven cheat, a disgrace to the game, and to the NFL head coaching fraternity.One letter apart in last name, yet the complete, polar opposite of beloved Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel.
Hey Josh, use a minuscule amount of that remaining 4.5 years of millions of dollars of pay, hire a financial advisor, get into investing, enjoy an early retirement and quietly f*ck off from the NFL forever, sir.
