Every team in the NFL takes on a big risk when it decides to fire its head coach and hire a new one. There’s no way to predict the future, and organizational decision-makers are forced to rely on each candidate’s resume to pick the right one, making it safer to hire someone with experience at the position versus someone with none.
But after hiring a Super Bowl-winner with 18 years of experience as an NFL head coach in Pete Caroll last offseason, only to have a disastrous season and fire him, the Las Vegas Raiders were willing to take a gamble this time around. In the spirit of the city, the Raiders rolled the dice on another former Seattle Seahawks coach, but one that didn’t have any experience in the position he was hired for: Klint Kubiak.
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Kubiak has called plays for three different organizations—the Minnesota Vikings, New Orleans Saints and Seahawks—and has been a coach in the league for 12, going on 13 years, but has never been in charge of running the entire operation until OTAs started at the beginning of April.
It’s still early, but the question does arise: What’s the difference between Klint Kubiak the offensive coordinator, and Klint Kubiak the head coach? To get the best answer, the player who knows him the best in Las Vegas’ locker room helped fill in the blanks.
“I may have to tread lightly with the answer,” quarterback Kirk Cousins joked with local reporters after mandatory minicamp on June 9 (h/t ESPN’s Ryan McFadden). “He’s been great. Football matters to him. There’s an intensity there, there’s an attention to detail, there’s an urgency that I’ve sensed from him as a head coach that I think is good for our football team.
“But it does cause me, when I’m driving into work in the morning, I’m kind of like ‘I feel it. I’d better be on today’. I check my watch four times to make sure I’m on time or early because I just feel like he brings that sense of urgency that the great coaches tend to bring, right? And it’s certainly not a laid-back atmosphere, I’ll just say that, and I think that’s a positive, but I think that comes with being a head coach.
“You feel that weight as a head coach, and it’s not an easy position to sit in. It can be lonely at the top, and I think he has to make sure that we’re running a tight ship and that we’re a great operation. We all feel that urgency pre-practice in the locker room, and I think that can be a healthy thing. …It’s not a picnic; we are not just out here having fun. It is work. …Guys are really focused, going over their stuff two or three times because they don’t want to be the guy who made the mental errors. I think that’s a really positive thing, but it’s not a country club.”
Klint Kubiak, Kirk Cousins in 2019
Cousins and Kubiak have a decent-sized history, as they first worked together with the Vikings in 2019. The now 14-year veteran was heading into his eighth NFL season and second in Minnesota at the time, while the coach hadn’t even been a coordinator yet and was a position coach for the first time, leading the quarterbacks. They ended up spending three years with each other, where Cousins made the Pro Bowl twice, to reinforce that he can recognize the difference in Kubiak more than anyone else.
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Another change for the Raiders’ new head man is learning how to delegate with the rest of the coaching staff. That’s something he talked about early on, referencing it during OTAs in mid-May.
“Yeah, obviously learning that on the fly,” Kubiak replied when asked about taking a step back from the offense and focusing more on the entire team. “We hired these assistants for a reason, so I got to trust them to do their jobs. And I know the Raiders brought me here for a reason as well, to coach offense. So, I’m going to be spending a lot of time with the offense and kind of make sure I get that right, all the while being with the whole team.
“But [defensive coordinator] Robbie Leonard and [special teams coordinator] Joe DeCamillis, two phenomenal coaches that I’m really happy to have leading their units.”
It sounds like that’s not just lip service, either. While Kubiak didn’t name offensive coordinator Andrew Janocko—who he’s worked with for five years and with three different teams (Vikings, New Orleans Saints and Seahawks)—in the quote above, Janocko shed light on the new dynamic between him and Kubiak.
“I think that’s something we grow with every day,” the OC said on May 28. “It’s maybe not something that you sit down and write out every single thing, but it’s something we grow with every single day. And we have a relationship where we can talk about everything. Really, we talk about anything, everything.
“We have for several years, whether it be X’s and O’s, how we’re breaking the huddle, or what [our kids] are studying in school that week. But just having that relationship where we could talk to each other about anything and everything, and that’s how that relationship grows. So, we see something that needs fixed, we fix it, whether it be between us and our communication, or the entire offense.”
To summarize the answer to the question, the difference between the offensive coordinator and head coach versions of Kubiak is a heightened sense of urgency that permeates throughout the building, and a leader who is willing to be collaborative and trusts the people under him.
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