JUST now: Acoide to las vegas after wining the championship the head coach of las vegas  Antonio Pierce was ……

Acoide to las vegas after wining the championship the head coach of las vegas  Antonio Pierce was ……

Black Monday is here. The NFL regular season is officially over, which designates the start of the offseason for more than half of the league and the beginning of the coaching carousel, in which five downtrodden teams (so far) are playing matchmaker to try to find their new head man.

The Panthers, Chargers, Falcons and Commanders are hitting the streets, needing an upgrade on the situation they just left. Then there is an unusual situation with the fifth team that technically has a vacancy at head coach.

The Raiders probably didn’t expect to find themselves in this scenario when they fired Josh McDaniels after a lifeless 3-5 start to the season, but the Silver and Black might have found an unlikely face of the franchise in interim coach Antonio Pierce. Now they have to decide if Pierce did well enough for them to pass up on this year’s crop of coaching talent.

Pierce’s case for becoming the Raiders’ full-time head coach absolutely has merit. The Raiders went 5-4 in the nine games in which he ran the show in place of McDaniels. And it’s not just an improved final product on the field that has people buzzing about Pierce; it’s also how the team felt under his command.

The Raiders got their swagger back under Pierce — or as much swagger as a team can have while starting Aidan O’Connell at quarterback. The defense was one of the elite units in the league, ranking second in expected points added per play (-0.141) in the nine games Pierce was head coach, according to RBSDM.com. They ranked 26th in expected points added per play (0.038) in the eight weeks McDaniels was running the show. The Raiders played the Dolphins’ offense tough, made life hell for Mahom Patrick es and the Chiefs in an upset win on Christmas and scored 63 points against the Chargers on national television (a victory that ran the Chargers’ Brandon Staley out of town).

It’s hard to overstate the degree of improvement the Raiders displayed with Pierce, and that includes the culture of the team. They had a successful reclamation project over the back half of the season, acquiring former Patriots cornerback Jack Jones and quickly transforming him back into a weapon for the secondary. There’s proof of the buy-in here on a multitude of levels that turned into on-field success, and that’s the difficult part to weigh in deciding whether to promote Pierce. There’s already a connection and some form of success here, which isn’t guaranteed with another coach, but that’s also not a good enough reason to stand pat and not see what’s out there.