Here's *Exactly Where* The Raiders Stand ONE WEEK Before Kickoff!

I cannot believe we are but six days away, scratch that, we are but seven days away from the Las Vegas Raiders going up against the Los Angeles Chargers, Jim Harbaugh, Antonio Pierce, Gardner Minshew, Justin Herbert, I think. I wanted to just come on here and quickly discuss, quickly or not quickly, I don't know, the state of the Raiders, I guess, but more importantly, how we got to this moment and how I'm currently feeling about the Raiders and my confidence level about how I think they're going to perform this season. And this is also going to be a place for you guys to let me know in the comments your confidence level because look, we are fans, right? We are fanatics. We die hard. We bleed silver and black the whole nine yards, right? With that comes a little bit of bias. So we're always going to go into a season thinking slightly more positively than maybe someone who isn't a Raider fan might think. And last year, I said we would go nine and eight and miss the playoffs. I'm not yet going to spoil what my actual final record prediction is because I will be live on Bleacher Report tomorrow, Monday, September 2nd, 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. If you want to follow me on Bleacher Report to make sure you get the notification for when I go live and do my final record prediction, the link will be in the description of this video and then there will be a post on this channel 30 minutes before that will also provide you with the link to that live stream. After that live stream is done, I will then be discussing the record on this channel and how good or bad I think we're going to do. And to be clear, I made a record prediction about a couple months ago, a month or two ago, I believe. And it was a tentative schedule comes out, what's my thoughts? And I said 11 and 6. This was me thinking that Aiden was going to win the job and that he was going to be much more improved than he was the year before. I thought he was definitely improved from what I saw, but I guess it wasn't enough for him to get the job right away. And if you saw my bull prediction video, you saw that I said he's going to make more starts than Gardner Minshew this season. Now, when I think about the state of the Raiders, when I think about my confidence level, I went from cautiously optimistic to cautious when they named Minshew the starter. Only because of what I've seen from the preseason and what I've heard reports coming out of practice. Because if you just told me we signed Gardner Minshew, and before I go any further, make sure if you're new to the channel, hit that subscribe button. Our goal is 10,000. We're making one final push to get there. Might we get to nine before the new league season? It's been done before to get that many subscribers in a small amount. About 70% of people that watch these videos are not yet subscribed. Don't be a lurker. If you've been watching me a while, hit that sub button. Let's go. And this is the quarterback that has shown some flashes that he can make some plays in this league. He's clearly earned another chance to be a starter for at least a season with what he did in Indianapolis. Indianapolis has a much inferior roster compared to ours in terms of offensive weaponry and the defensive arsenal we have as well. He took that team to nine wins and was a dropped pass away from eliminating the Houston Texans from the playoffs, winning the AFC South, and hosting a playoff game. That was Gardner Minshew who led that team, not Anthony Richardson. Of course, people are going to say it was Shane Steichen who helped him out a lot, and we'll see what happens with Luke Getzey. And there's going to also be people that say you cannot go off of what you hear in practice in preseason games because it's a lot of vanilla stuff. It's a lot of, you know, not playing with pads. We're going up against the best defense in the league, our offenses, when we practice every week. And when we play teams like the Carolina Panthers, they're not going to be as good as a team defensively that we were practicing every day against. So I could still be cautiously optimistic, but for right now, I'm just cautious. I don't know how things are going to go with Gardner. I'm very worried about how things are going to go with Devontae Adams if we start losing games right off the bat. Maybe Antonio Pierce's way to get Devontae Adams to be bought in a whole 17 games is to have Aidan be the backup initially, and if things go south, put Aidan in, and now Devontae's happy again. However, I'm only cautious when it comes to the quarterback, and obviously that's a big reason. That's a big thing to be cautious about, sure. No doubt about it. But what I will say is this. I'm optimistic about damn near everything else that we have built from the last offseason till right now, starting with Antonio Pierce. He's shown, look, I've beaten the source to death. I'm not going to spend too much time on AP in particular, but he's shown a willingness to admit that he does not know everything. He's brought guys in to help him. He's got coordinators around him. He's got Tom Telesco around him to make sure we have the best conducive environment to play good ball when we're practicing in OTAs, in training camp, in the preseason. I liked what he did with the roster. I like what he's saying in press conferences, and save for naming Gardner Mitchell the starter, which again is not just something we can throw to the side. That's a pretty big deal, but save for that, I've agreed with basically everything else he's done and said, and I've been saying this for a long, long time now. I think it's much harder to find your next great coach than it is to find your next great quarterback, and I also think if you told me right now, would I rather have found our next great coach or our next great quarterback, I'm taking the coach all day and night, because a great coach, you can be competitive and make the playoffs every single year a la Mike Tomlin. If you have a good to great quarterback like Justin Herbert, who is the franchise guy for the Los Angeles Chargers, doesn't matter how good he is, if the team around him or if the coach isn't up to par with Herbert, you're not going to make the playoffs. It just is what it is. So for right now, I'm very optimistic that we found our head coach for the foreseeable future. Luke Goetze is another guy I'm extremely optimistic about, because he's shown a willingness to mold the offense around the players we have, rather than a Josh McDaniels who wanted to mold the players that we had around his offense. He wanted Derek Carr to be Tom Brady, and that was not going to happen. Luke Goetze seems to be taking Brock Bowers, putting him in the slot, splitting him out wide, putting Michael Mayer in the game with Brock Bowers, having Dylan Lauby and Zamir White on the field at the same time. Brock Bowers is the fullback. Uh-oh, now he's the running back. What are we going to do? And it's a triple reverse back to Minchu, Devante, Jacoby, Trey Tucker over the top. This does not look like the Bears offense that struggled to score points. This does look like the Bears offense that was moving the ball very well on the run, and maybe Justin Fields and some of the weapons that Luke Goetze had kind of handicapped him. So I think for right now, Luke Goetze has shown me enough a willingness to adapt, to use the weapons we have, and boy do we have a lot of them, to be optimistic about him. I loved what Tom Telesco did in this draft with taking the best available player in the draft at 13 with Brock Bowers, maybe the best player in the draft. We got the left guard of the future in Jackson Powers Johnson. DJ Glaze has already shown an ability, and Dylan Lauby has already been making a lot of plays in not only the preseason, but in training camp. The rest of those late round guys, we'll see if they hit or not. Those ones are always tougher to hit, but I'm happy with some of the position guys that we've drafted that look to already make an immediate impact. And last, but certainly not least, this defense is absolutely for real. It was not a fluke. We've seen it in the preseason. We've seen it in training camp. We've heard the rumblings. It is not only impossible now to guard two block Malcolm Koontz and Max Crosby, but you've added Christian Wilkins. There's no doubt in my mind we are going to have a top two or three front four in the league. If Diablo could take just one more step, and Spillane can do what he did, we are going to have one of the best front sevens in the league. And now with the addition of a year two, Jacorian Bennett, who has taken the reins of the CB2 spot. They have cut Brandon Faison. They didn't sign another cornerback, and there's out there who in theory could have been better than Jacorian Bennett. That means that they trust Jack Jones, which I do completely. They trust Nate Hobbs in the slot, which I do completely, and they trust Jacorian Bennett to be that CB2. And from everything that I've heard in training camp from beat writers and reporters that I've seen these two practice, Marcus Epps and Trayvon Merrick are going to show that they might be a top two or three defensive safety duo in the National Football League. So what does all this mean? Why does this video exist? It's because I want to show you that not only do I feel not great about the quarterback position, but I feel absolutely incredible about everything else. Which means if Gardner doesn't become Rich Gannon, if Aiden doesn't come in and take the bull by the reins, we quite literally are a quarterback away from Super Bowl contention. And I think we have to do our due diligence with upcoming free agents Dak Prescott, potential trades Aaron Rodgers, and guys in the draft. Shodor Sanders, Cam Ward, Quinn Ewers, Drew Alar. These guys all could be guys that we need to be looking at, scouting. We probably will take one in the first round if we don't make the playoffs. And even if we do make the playoffs and one of them falls, we might still grab one. We just have to make sure that we have our guys, our all pros like Max and Christian Wilkins and Devontae, right? These guys need to be ready to know. These guys need to be aware that Telesco and AP are ready to pull the trigger on a different quarterback if the two we have right now do not pan out. We need to make sure that we keep these guys happy and we stay competitive because we don't want them turning on us. We don't want the fan base to go through another year of ups and downs. I do think we're going to win a lot of games and lose a lot of games, but we need to be consistent in how we go about those. We cannot blow a bunch of first half leads like McDaniels or lose 9 out of 11 games by 7 points or less. It has to be a gutty performance week to week, which I think Antonio Pierce is showing. We need to win games by running the football, play action pass, a little razzle dazzle and a defensive toughness that every time you play us, even if you beat us, it's going to hurt you next week and you're going to be damned to win two games in a row if the first game you won is our game because it's going to be very hard to bounce back from a game that you've played against the Las Vegas Raiders. So that's my thoughts on the state right now. Again, this is just a forum for me to express that I'm cautiously optimistic about a lot of stuff and only cautious about the quarterback situation. It's been a couple of weeks and I'm still not on board with the Gardner of it all, but we'll see. I'm not the coach. I'm not the GM. I'm not the coordinator. I'm not in a position to make that decision. So we will see how good we do. Again, my record prediction will be Bleach Report live stream tomorrow, Monday, September 2nd, 3 p.m. Eastern. Link is in the description to set a reminder to follow me, to turn on those notifications, download the Bleach Report app if you don't have it. I'll be on there. Make sure you are chatting away in the comment section. There's going to be a live chat rolling. I'm going to talk about every single game. It's going to be about 30 minutes in length. Link in the description to our Discord. Our Discord is a group chat. It's completely free. We're talking. I mean, week one, it's going to be awesome to be in there talking to all you guys. Last but not least, check out that Patreon, patreon.com slash All Aboard Raiders. You get your name at the end of the and you get videos like this days in advance. Please be sure to subscribe. It's free. I'll throw no charge to you. I love you guys, and I'll see you next time.