As if Las Vegas Raiders head coach Antonio Pierce needed another reason to be fired, he gave another one in the 19-17 Week 13 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs.
Bad coaching decisions have been an issue all season long, which has only made things more difficult for the Raiders in what has been a disastrous 2024 season.
Pierce was back at it again on Friday when the Raiders were in position to possibly beat the Chiefs with a field goal near the end of regulation.
With 15 seconds left on the clock, no timeouts and the ball at the Chiefs’ 32-yard line, Pierce decided to run another play instead of immediately attempting the field goal. That’s when disaster struck: center Jackson Powers-Johnson snapped the ball and quarterback Aidan O’Connell wasn’t ready, leading to a fumble the Chiefs recovered to seal their win.
At the time, we figured Pierce was trying to get closer for his struggling kicker who had missed three field goal attempts throughout the course of the game.
However, that turned out not to be the case. Instead, Pierce said he was trying to run more time off the clock before kicking the field goal, with the obvious goal of giving the Chiefs even less time than they would’ve had.
Raiders coach Antonio Pierce says the plan on the botched snap was to just kill a few seconds off the clock and throw the ball away to then kick the 49-yard field goal.
— Jonathan Jones (@jjones9) November 29, 2024
Bear in mind, the Chiefs would’ve had about 10 seconds left to try and win the game had Daniel Carlson made the kick. Pierce’s thought process is even more baffling when you consider that the Raiders’ defense had played well and was stifling Kansas City all game long.
When asked about the botched snap after the game, both O’Connell and Powers-Johnson took blame, but the pair never should have been in that situation in the first place.
With every week that passes, it becomes more and more obvious that the Raiders simply cannot go into the future with Pierce as their head coach.
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