Raiders at 3-0: The Wins Are Real, the Foundation Is Not

In the final fifteen minutes against the New Orleans Saints, the Las Vegas Raiders defense took the ball away from the opponent four times. Four times in a single fourth quarter. The score settled at 35-27, Allegiant Stadium erupted, and out there, across the news feeds, people had already started sketching a February picture.

I sat still.

Three straight wins to open the season. The first such start since 2026. A brand-new head coach just hired. A veteran quarterback just arrived. A franchise that, for the past thirteen seasons, has mostly existed as a backdrop for other people's stories. A genuine fairy tale.

Which is exactly why I did not sing along.

People call me a spoilsport. I call it reading the run before it happens.

Pouring the foundation in mid-autumn

Klint Kubiak took the head-coaching chair at the Las Vegas Raiders before the season even began. At the same time, Kirk Cousins — a quarterback who has moved past the downhill side of his career — was handed the keys to the offense. Two new men in the two most important positions of an organization, in the same season. This is the kind of system installation that coaches call the newcomer's honeymoon: everything still feels pleasant because nobody has had time to read you yet.

In European football, people call it the new-manager bounce. In the V-League, I saw it many times: a club appoints a new coach mid-season, wins three in a row playing a brand of football so tight it seems unbelievable, and by round eight every gap is exposed and the whole thing collapses like a tent pitched into the wrong wind.

Kubiak carries a notable coaching lineage. Men from this lineage are usually tied to an offensive school that uses the outside run as its spine, mixes in play-action fakes and bootlegs from the quarterback. That is a system deliberately built to protect a quarterback who does not move much, while placing the weight on the running game. I say "usually" because this is an inference from a professional lineage, not something any press release confirms.

That matters because it shapes how we read the last three games. A new system needs time to soak in. Three games are not enough to call it a success or a failure. But three games are enough to say something else: what made this team unbeaten is not necessarily what will keep them unbeaten in November.

A different league structure, the exact same trap

European football fans looking at American professional football are often stunned by the institutional differences. There are no transfer fees. No world-record blockbuster deals. Players arrive through the draft and free agency. Every club is capped at the same salary ceiling, and television money is shared evenly from one common pot. In other words, the league's ceiling and floor are flattened by rule.

That is why a team like the Raiders can leap up without an owner pouring money like water. In Europe, a mid-tier club wanting to break into the Champions League group must buy a few stars, and usually pays for it with a decade of financial strain. Here, the resource balance is designed to be fairer by default. What you need is not exactly money, but the right system and a quarterback who does not shoot himself in the foot.

But a fair structure cannot erase the most familiar trap in every team sport: results running ahead of process.

I remember the 2026 V-League season. Quang Nam had a squad averaging close to thirty years of age, and I wrote that they would be relegated because they no longer had legs to run. People threw stones at me. By the end of the season, Quang Nam really were relegated. In Quang Nam I learned something: people hate you for being right one season before them. And that lesson repeats in every league, including the ones where the ball is not round.

There is another major difference football fans need to grasp. In Europe, a club can buy a star mid-season to patch a mistake. Here, the mid-season market essentially does not exist; you must live with the men you chose in September. That means every hole in the roster gets magnified over time rather than being temporarily plugged by a loan deal. A new coach in this league is not allowed to buy time; he is only allowed to buy a system.

Three games, one defense, and an average offense

Now to the data. Across three games, the Raiders score 29.3 points per game and allow 18.0. The differential is plus thirty-four. If you only read this far, you would think this is a balanced, two-way, formidable team. The league average sits around twenty-two points scored and twenty-two allowed per game, so their defensive number is better than the norm, while the offense has only edged above ordinary.

Keep reading.

In the 35-27 win over the Saints, the Raiders offense totaled just 340 yards. In American professional football, 340 yards is the level of an ordinary afternoon's work. It is not bad. It is simply not the kind of thing that makes people stand up. And in the first three games, quarterback Kirk Cousins threw six touchdown passes, meaning two per game. An efficient, tidy, mistake-free rate. But also not the rate of a man carrying a franchise on his shoulders.

So what actually produced the win over the Saints? Four fourth-quarter takeaways.

In any sport that keeps score, there exists a category of variable I call measurable luck. In football — the round-ball kind — it is the gap between actual goals and expected goals. A team that wins five straight matches 1-0 through deflected finishes will soon pay the price, because that rate does not repeat. In American football, that variable is called turnover margin. Four takeaways in one quarter is a rare statistical event. Rare means beautiful, and rare also means unsustainable.

This is where I want to pause. Four fourth-quarter takeaways are not a skill; they are an event. Skill is what repeats next week. Events do not.

There is an even more suspicious internal detail. If you take the ball away four times in the fourth quarter, you should win by more than eight points. But that game ended 35-27. That means the offense failed to cash in fully on the gifts the defense brought home. That is not the mark of a machine. That is the mark of a team living off its opponent's margin of error.

And this is where my tools go blunt. In football, I can open the expected-goals board, pressing metrics, line-breaking counts, to say whether a champion won through system or through luck. In American professional football, equivalent metrics exist — expected points added, opponent-adjusted efficiency, points per drive — but they are not in my hands right now. I do not have them. Which means I can only describe the last three games, not prove their tactical sophistication. A numbers hunter without numbers must say it plainly: I am reading with my eyes, and eyes are easily fooled.

Fifteen years of watching football taught me one thing about fast starts. The first three games do not measure a team's quality; they measure its fitness readiness and how surprising its tactics still are. Once opponents have film, once the lines are worn down, once referees start calling the fouls you used to escape, the real team emerges.

American football's anti-tiki-taka

Years ago, as a twenty-three-year-old journalism student, I wrote a contentious piece arguing that Southeast Asian football should not copy Spain's possession doctrine. Many people threw stones at me. But I believed what I wrote: a football culture that wants to grow must find the game that fits its own people, not borrow someone else's shirt. I called it anti-tiki-taka: a game that does not need to hold the ball much, only to hold it at the right moment and punish the opponent the instant they lose structure.

American professional football has its own version. An offense does not need to dominate time of possession if the defense hands it the ball in favorable field position. That is a legitimate philosophy. The problem is that this philosophy turns the team into a hostage of its own defense. As long as the defense can force turnovers, the team wins. The day it cannot, the offense must stand up on its own — and that is when we finally learn what the offense really is.

Over these three games, the Raiders offense is 340 yards and two touchdown passes per game. That is an incomplete answer. But it is also the only answer we have.

The AFC West is no place to build a house with hollow bricks

The Raiders play in the AFC West. And in the AFC West, every story must pass through one name: Kansas City.

Kansas City are also 3-0. This is no small detail, because it turns Week 4 into a classifying game. In football, matches between direct rivals competing for the same slot are called six-pointers. American football does not use that phrase, but the essence is identical: a game between two unbeaten teams in the same division will redefine the standing and the image of both.

If the Raiders win, the story shifts from surprise start to genuine contender. If the Raiders lose, the old order returns, and the last three games get downgraded to a good clip shown at the wrong time.

Let me be clear: I am not saying the Raiders will collapse. I am saying we do not yet have enough data to call them championship contenders. The distance between those two sentences is far greater than it appears. A team can win three games and still have proven nothing. In fact, that is the most common state of nearly every team in the opening weeks.

In football, I have seen far too many clubs open with three unbeaten games and finish mid-table. The issue was never the first three games. The issue is the fourth, when opponents begin to have film to study you with.

Notably, the original report planted its own brake. It reminded readers that a good start does not equal a title, and that this franchise has gone thirteen seasons without a deep playoff run. A newspaper building itself an exit ramp is a sign of caution — and that caution, coming from the very people filing the story, deserves more of my attention than the blazing headlines.

Where I could be wrong

People think I enjoy going against the crowd. Not exactly. I enjoy going against conclusions drawn without a foundation. But I must also reread myself, because a spoilsport who refuses to check himself is just a loud man.

So where could I be wrong?

First, the Raiders defense may genuinely be good at generating turnovers, not merely lucky. Some defensive systems are designed to force opposing quarterbacks into throwing where a defender is waiting. If those four takeaways were the product of a detailed plan, they are not an accident but an output. I have no data on that defensive scheme, so I must leave the door open.

Second, 340 yards may be a misleading number. An offense that runs the ball deliberately to protect its quarterback will post low total yards while still controlling the game. If Kubiak is building an offense with the run game as its spine, then Cousins throwing two touchdown passes a game is not a sign of weakness but a sign of a correct plan.

Third, my sample is only three games. In statistics, three data points do not draw a trend line; they draw a scribble. Every conclusion of mine about unsustainability rests on a general principle of probability, not on specific evidence from this team.

Fourth, and this is the point that bothers me most: my tools were forged for a different sport. I am used to reading football through expected goals and pressing intensity. Here I am reading with my eyes, my memory, and general principles. A hunter using the wrong rifle can still hit the target, but the odds are lower, and he ought to know that before boasting about the kill.

Fifth, there is an occupational risk I must name. In the past three seasons, I myself have been swept into the game of tearing down newly risen teams, only to watch them stand firm to the end of the campaign. Well-crafted skepticism is not the same as correct skepticism. I must distinguish the two before I go to print.

What will prove me right, and when

I do not write predictions in the we-shall-see style. I write predictions with markers, so I can judge myself.

Marker one: Week 4, against Kansas City. If the Raiders win that game with an offense scoring over thirty points and without needing two or more takeaways, I will have to rewrite this piece. If they lose, or win while turnover supremacy continues, my argument stands.

Marker two: after Week 8. If by then the Raiders' turnover margin has returned to the league average while they keep winning, the offense has genuinely stood up and I am wrong in a dignified way. If that margin returns to average and they start losing, then the first three games were merely a payday loan, and this season is when the interest comes due.

Three signals I will track week by week: total offensive yards per game, the conversion rate of takeaways into points, and Cousins' availability. If two of these three worsen at the same time, the picture will change color very quickly.

I do not need the Raiders to fail in order to be right. I need to see an offense with enough character not to live on gifts.

The Raiders do not need a golden generation. They need a generation willing to play the football others fear.

That sounds grandiose for a team that has just won three games. But that is precisely the point. Over thirteen seasons, the Raiders have not lacked moments. They have lacked an identity strong enough to hold when luck departs. An identity not built on the opponent making mistakes, but on knowing who you are.

Cousins is a medium-term solution. Kubiak is a long-term bet. Turnover margin is a short-term gift. Add the three together and you get a beautiful start — and a beautiful start has never been an identity.

The night I write this, all of Las Vegas is singing. Three weeks later they will understand why I did not sing.

And if I am wrong — if this team really has found its voice — then I will be the first to sit down, reopen the data, and write an apology as long as this piece. I am not afraid of being wrong. I am only afraid of writing something I dare not defend.