Graney: Raiders players, coaches never purposefully went into tank mode

You’ve probably seen the billboard off Interstate-15: TIME TO COMPETE

It’s a word Pete Carroll has used since his opening news conference when being introduced as Raiders coach. He over and over talked about players competing on a daily basis.

And for the most part, they did.

Carroll has been an experiment that didn’t work. Doesn’t mean he can’t coach. Doesn’t mean he suddenly forgot what makes for a successful football team.

He inherited a bad team and just couldn’t make it any better.

He also didn’t expect any of this. Can’t fathom how things got this bad.

“What have I learned?” Carroll said. “How much I don’t like it. Yeah. Disappointed as I could be. I’ve never even dreamed it would be like this, but what I have learned is that these guys will continue to work and they’ll stay with it. It’s just because they don’t want to accept it.

“They want to only focus on the next opportunity that’s coming up, which is kind of how we think and that something good’s just about to happen.”

In a total eyesore of a game, the Raiders on Sunday finished their season by beating the Chiefs 14-12 at Allegiant Stadium.

It was so bad …

How bad was it? It was the best example you could have against ever going to an 18-game schedule.

How weird was it? The Raiders scored their 14 points via four field goals and a safety.

A positive note: The Raiders will pick first in the NFL draft in April.

Hello, Fernando Mendoza?

There are two ways of thinking when it comes to continuing to play hard as losses piled on top of each other: That these are professional athletes making millions of dollars and should never have an issue with giving maximum effort. And that competing should be second nature to all of them.

But losing so much wears on people, no matter their position within an organization. Such consistent failure isn’t easy to handle. They’re human, too.

“They’ve bounced back,” Carroll said. “And, I mean, they’ve been as down in the dumps as you can be on Tuesdays, but by the time we get to Wednesday, they know that there’s a format that we follow that gets you back on track.

“I could see teams really being in trouble. I could see guys just going south on you, and we all know stories of that. That’s happened for years. These guys didn’t do that.”

No tanking for Raiders

Even though continuing to lose was the best thing for the Raiders — they absolutely needed as high a draft pick as possible to chase a potential franchise quarterback — I don’t for a second believe coaches or players purposefully went into tank mode.

Not built that way. Too tough a game.

Obviously, sitting top players like Maxx Crosby and Brock Bowers the last few weeks because of injury was a sign of accepting one’s fate. I would have sat anyone and everyone with some sort of ailment.

Why risk anything when the record is what it was? When the top pick in the draft was at stake?

You can say the Raiders continued to compete for Carroll.

They just weren’t near good enough at much of anything.

Ed Graney, a Sigma Delta Chi Award winner for sports column writing, can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com. Follow @edgraney on X.