Silver and Black roots. What it means to be a Raider. Understanding “The Raider Way.”

These are the ties that suffocate. Another year, another head coach, all in the pursuit of the fading, yellowing images of what a franchise used to be and how it might be again. All setting the stage for the next chapter of the Los Angeles/Oakland/Las Vegas Raiders, whose biggest problem is not a head coach or quarterback, but an owner who keeps Xeroxing the identity of his father, Al Davis, rather than meaningfully and patiently crafting one of his own.

It’s an imitation game under Mark Davis that is now five copies deep and bleached into nothingness — from Dennis Allen to Jack Del Rio, Jon Gruden to Josh McDaniels, and now Pierce to whoever Davis believes gets his team and legacy closer to a heyday that has sparsely appeared since the turn of the century. That will be six head coaches Davis has hired in the 13 years since he took over the franchise after his father’s death. All of whom came in espousing their own personal understanding about what it meant to be a Raider and promising to recapture a proud history that was growing more distant by the year.

In they came, trying to restore The Raider Way. And out they went, with their results most often representing a Raider Way that has been redefined in two decades of damning familiarity — filled with mediocrity, unfulfilled promises and a bloated payroll of defunct coaching hires pushed into the ether. A pattern of results under ownership that, to be fair, wasn’t simply a product of Mark Davis, but also an extension of Al’s final years. Tracing history all the way back to the firing of Art Shell following the 1994 season, which triggered an unfathomable run of what will be 15 head coach hirings in 31 years once Pierce’s replacement is named.

This isn’t a trend. It’s wreckage.

It continues today out of the pursuit of a culture that doesn’t exist — and hasn’t existed consistently — since the mid-1990s. It’s a creeping plague that is no different than Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones still living fever dream remembrances of his teams from 30 years ago. It’s facilitated by an owner in Mark Davis whose wandering impatience from one coach and general manager to the next is no different than what made former team owner Dan Snyder a staggering on-field failure with his Washington franchise. All punctuated by a sudden listlessness at quarterback, which was presented with meaningful resolutions in the 2024 draft but oddly lacked the “Raider Way” aggression to enact a plan.

To be clear: This isn’t a criticism of Pierce’s firing. It is a condemnation of the process that created this juncture. Beginning with Davis rebooting the team under Pierce in 2023, after convening with Maxx Crosby, Davante Adams and Josh Jacobs — two of whom aren’t on the roster anymore — and then choosing a head coach who is now gone, too.

All setting in motion a 2024 path that veered into a crater — starting with a failure to secure a real answer at quarterback for Pierce, then ended with sending him out to address the media one day before he found out he was being fired. It was a situation so awkward inside the team’s headquarters that, according to sources who spoke with Yahoo Sports, Pierce had already started discussing potential coaching staff changes hours before he learned he was losing his job.

The disjointed and embarrassing ending preceded a one-paragraph sendoff:

Predictably, it paid homage to the Culture That Al Davis Built, with references to Pierce’s “Silver and Black roots” and his “ability to reignite what it means to be a Raider.”

Pierce went 9-17 and won four games in 2024. From that vantage, he did indeed embody what it means to be a Raider. Especially under Mark Davis, whose teams now field a 91-137 regular-season record since he took the reins of the franchise in 2011. That’s a .397 winning percentage that — compared with peers that have a similar number of years as principal owner — is worse than everyone but the Cleveland Browns’ Jimmy Haslam (.345) and the Jacksonville Jaguars’ Shad Khan (.301).

Since Mark Davis took over, The Raider Way hasn’t been all that dissimilar to the Jaguar Way or Brown Way when it comes to actual results.

This is what happens when you cling to an identity that is borrowed rather than created. When one of your overriding factors in hiring your next head coach is whether he can recreate the culture of the past. You don’t hear the San Francisco 49ers constantly harping about staying true to the offensive genius of how Bill Walsh constructed the 49ers in the 1980s. The Green Bay Packers aren’t obsessed with chasing coaches who preach the foundational teachings of Vince Lombardi. There is no underlined and oft-spoken mantra about paying homage to something that should be occasionally celebrated on classic NFL Films reels and then turned off when the work of today begins.

Are there outliers to this? Certainly. The Pittsburgh Steelers have found a way to remain consistent to their brand of football for decades. So too have the Baltimore Ravens. They regularly address the “Steelers brand of football” or the “Ravens type of player.” But there’s a rub in both of those organizations that eludes the Raiders. They hire good coaches and front-office executives and then get out of the way and let them do their jobs.

Chew on this for a moment: In the time span that the Raiders will have made 15 head coaching hires since 1995, the Steelers will have made two and the Ravens will have made three. As it turns out, it’s a lot easier to sustain and grow a culture with roots when you actually let coaching staffs and front offices develop them.

Inside the AFC West, other ownership groups have moved to establish that kind of structure. It’s why the Kansas City Chiefs hired Andy Reid four days after he was fired by the Philadelphia Eagles in 2013. It’s why the Denver Broncos turned all of the power in their football operation over to Sean Payton. And it’s why the Los Angeles Chargers — not always considered the most forward-thinking ownership group in the NFL — went after Jim Harbaugh as their culture builder last offseason, then let him retool everything as he saw fit.

This is what the Raiders are dealing with in their own division. They’re facing ownership groups that are not only competent, but also willing and capable of making quality hires, putting those hires fully at the controls of their franchises, and then getting out of the way to let the results speak for themselves. There’s little evidence Davis has ever done that. And now fans are led to believe that maybe Tom Brady — who has never run an NFL franchise from the ownership suite, never coached an NFL team and never spent a single day as a personnel executive or talent evaluator — might be the requisite magic wand to resolve all problems?

Mark Davis will continue to be the common denominator beneath all of it. The sooner he recognizes himself as being the roots of his own Silver and Black problem, the better his chances of taking “what it means to be a Raider” and writing his own unique chapter, rather than Xeroxing another page from decades of disappointment.