Las Vegas Raiders 2026 Season Preview — No Luck to Blame, Nothing Left to Excuse | Muffed

This is the Las Vegas Raiders 2026 season preview, and it starts with a distinction that matters more than it sounds: most bad teams are a little unlucky. The 2025 Raiders were not. They went 3-and-14, and their point differential says they earned every bit of it — the pythagorean math puts them at three and a half wins, almost exactly what they got. No brutal one-score record to point at, no turnover fluke, no asterisk. That's the rarest profile in football: an honest 3-and-14. And in a strange way it's the most useful thing about them, because when a season is that legitimately bad, you know exactly what has to change. Las Vegas apparently agreed — and then changed everything.

What was real: one of the worst offenses of the modern era. The Raiders finished dead last in expected points added per play, and it wasn't a normal last — it was one of the five worst offensive seasons of the past decade. The running game was the historic part: the worst rushing efficiency any team has posted in ten years — and here's the sentence that should genuinely alarm you — the second-worst belongs to the 2024 Raiders. Back to back, the two worst rushing seasons of the decade, same franchise. The passing game wasn't the antidote: Geno Smith threw a league-most 17 interceptions and took 55 sacks behind a line that allowed sacks on 10.7 percent of dropbacks — the most-sacked offense in football. Third downs converted at a 28th-ranked 34.7 percent. And the charting data adds the no-excuse detail: Las Vegas ran into light boxes — six or fewer defenders — at one of the highest rates in the league, and still finished last. Defenses weren't loading up to stop this run game. They didn't have to.

The defense was merely below average — 21st in expected points allowed — which counts as heroism in context. Maxx Crosby got to double-digit sacks, ten, in a season he eventually shut down with a knee injury. The identity, charting data via nflverse, was pure Pete Carroll: zone on 79.6 percent of dropbacks, third-most in the NFL, with the second-highest Cover-3 rate in football and a bottom-six blitz rate. Deep zone shells, rally to the ball, hope the offense shows up. It didn't, and Carroll was fired on January 5th after one season — the fourth head coach in four years.

What was luck? Nothing. That's the section. They were 2-and-5 in one-score games, mildly unlucky at the margins, and the bounce math gives bad-close-game teams a couple of wins back on average. But there is no version of this where variance explains 2025. Which brings us to the actual story of this preview: the most complete single-offseason teardown in the league.

Start at the top: the new head coach is Klint Kubiak, hired straight off calling plays for the Seattle Seahawks — the team that just won the Super Bowl with the league's third-highest-scoring offense. And this is where our data lets you see the future with unusual confidence, because play-calling identity is the single stickiest thing a coach carries — the most predictable year-over-year trait in football, more than any performance stat. Kubiak's Seattle offense passed six percent below expectation, bottom-three run commitment in the entire league, wide zone, play-action, heavy sets. That is the offense Las Vegas just bought — and they bought it parts included. Tyler Linderbaum, the best center on the market, signed for 81 million over three years, the richest center contract in NFL history. Left tackle Kolton Miller and guard Jackson Powers-Johnson return from season-ending injuries. A third-round guard, Trey Zuhn, arrives from Texas A&M. The most-sacked, worst-rushing line in football got its two best players back and added the league's most expensive center.

Then the quarterbacks — plural, because this is a bridge structure with the whole franchise riding on it. Geno Smith was traded to the Jets in March. Kirk Cousins signed in April — 20 million guaranteed, a Kubiak-family quarterback going back to his Minnesota years — as the veteran floor. And with the first overall pick, the Raiders took Fernando Mendoza, the Heisman winner who just led Indiana to a 16-and-0 national title. The stated plan is Cousins early, Mendoza when ready; the head coach says all three quarterbacks get first-team camp reps; the national consensus expects the rookie within the first month or two. However it sequences, 2026 is measured in Mendoza reps, not wins. One more piece of drama worth knowing: Maxx Crosby was traded to Baltimore in March — for two first-round picks — until the Ravens pulled out when he failed the physical on his surgically repaired knee. The trade died; Crosby is still a Raider, at OTAs, preaching patience. That's a story with a second act coming, one way or the other.

The 2026 question is Ashton Jeanty, and the data demands honesty the hype won't give you. The rookie year looks grim on the surface — 975 yards at 3.67 a carry — and the surface is real, but the split matters: the rushing-yards-over-expected model, which accounts for blocking, says Jeanty finished about 51 yards below what an average back gets from the same carries — 41st of 49 qualifiers. In other words: the line was historically bad, and Jeanty still left something on the field. That's the uncomfortable half. The encouraging half: 55 catches, 346 yards, five receiving touchdowns as a rookie — a real three-down receiving profile — and a new head coach publicly describing a rarely-off-the-field, Christian McCaffrey-style role for him in a scheme that made Kenneth Walker a champion. Volume is coming. The bet is whether efficiency follows the new line, or whether year one was telling us something. And don't forget the other year-three star: Brock Bowers played 2025 on a wrecked knee — a Week 1 PCL injury he dragged through 12 games for 64 catches, 680 yards and a team-high seven touchdown catches before landing on injured reserve. He says he's 100 percent. A healthy Bowers is this offense's best player the moment the ball is snapped.

Fantasy names to know — scored half-P-P-R. Jeanty is the argument of draft season: the efficiency data says wait, the projected role says go, and in this offense the role usually wins — Kubiak backfields feed one back. Bowers at his current price is a bet on the knee, and the knee is the only thing that ever slowed him. Tre Tucker — 57 catches, 696 yards, team-leading receiver by yardage — and newcomer Jalen Nailor fight for what's left of a run-first target tree. Cousins has no fantasy case beyond the bridge weeks, and Mendoza's value is a keeper-league conversation, not a 2026 one.

The verdict. The win total sits at five and a half, and the market spent the spring flipping from a juiced under to a juiced over — the books watched this offseason and adjusted. The data supports the direction: dead-last offenses over the past decade improved the following season eight times out of nine, by nearly three wins on average, and this one added the most proven offensive infrastructure money could buy. But Denver won 14 games in this division last season, the Chargers won 11, and Kansas City is priced for the biggest bounce in football. The honest frame for 2026: the floor rises fast, the record rises slower, and the real scoreboard is whether Mendoza looks like the quarterback of the 2028 Raiders by December. Las Vegas spent a decade blaming coaches, quarterbacks, and luck. This is the first year in a while they've left themselves nothing to blame. That's progress — the muffed kind, but progress.

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