The NFL is getting weirder every week. If you doubt that, let us introduce you to Saquon Barkley's flying tail as the first thing you see when he and it sail over your head. It's getting harder and harder to keep up with all the concussion nonsense in this league, especially in a week where two season-winning teams triumphed on the same day.

But then, just as your disorientation threatens to swallow you whole, there are the Las Vegas Raiders. To call them a pillar of stability would be inaccurate, but damned if they aren't reliable. Their ability to play backwards (hello again, Saquon) is overwhelming, and three of their most prominent offensive coaches demonstrated it after a loss on Sunday – nine months after those coaches were hired and nine games into the current season.

Head coach Antonio Pierce suffered the team's fifth straight loss, a standard 17-point loss by Cincinnati that dropped the Raiders into a six-way tie and 2-2 by firing offensive coordinator Luke Getsy, the offensive line coach. 7 brought the worst record in the league with James Cregg and quarterbacks coach Rich Scangarello. He discontinued them all in February, suggesting they went bad for him in record time.

The decision won't generate the same level of WTFery as the New Orleans Saints firing coach Dennis Allen (a former Raider head coach) amid a flame war between former wide receiver Michael Thomas and current quarterback Derek Carr (also a former). raiders). But that's only because we expect the Raiders to do things like this – put together an offensive coaching tree and cut it down nine months later, rip the stump out of the yard and mulch the property. This is what they do self-parodically year after year: they assume that they have accumulated the necessary talent to win, but then they don't, and then they blame the coaching side for their failure to do so Lack of talent to develop.

The gaps in this logical move are significant enough to make it more of an abandoned caboose that won't change anything. The Raiders do this too often for it to factor into the overall plan. Since the 2002 Super Bowl, their last moment of glory, these guys have hired and fired more coaches and assistants than any other team. That makes sense because only one team has lost more games during that time than the Raiders. What makes it truly Raideresque is the inability or unwillingness to see any relationship between the two.

However, it's rare for a team's head coach to get so fed up with the people he hired that he fires them in the middle of their first season – not just one, but three. By that logic, Pierce hates the playcalling, the blocking that makes those plays succeed or fail, and the quarterbacks (three so far) who are tasked with making it all work. If you saw the Raiders do any of these things, it's understandable, but still notable considering the season is only nine weeks old. The Raiders also traded away their disgruntled WR1 Davante Adams so he could pursue his lifelong dream of playing with the 6-11 Jets; This all suggests that Pierce only approves of running back Alexander Mattison and his 301 yards and running backs coach Cadillac Williams, to name just two other people brought in as part of the Pierce era.

And when we say “era,” we do so knowing that the average Raider head coach lasts 28 games before being fired. That means they get a full year, plus a second year that ends on Thanksgiving. Pierce is certainly aware of this and is determined to get everything he wants in the remaining 19 games of his tenure – a new locker room, a better front office, an owner who will pay more attention to his WNBA team, the growing possibility that If this is the case, it could soon be all Tom Brady's problem. Of course, the only thing Pierce lacks is time, but he knew this job was as dangerous as it was temporary when he took it.

In this case, however, we praise his impetuosity. Not because there's anything more wrong with Getsy, Cregg and Scangarello than anyone else on any other team, but because if you're just going to stick around for a while you might as well put up whatever wallpaper you want. It won't make a difference, of course, because the roster is the roster and gravity wins every time, but this mass axing of offensive decision-makers is still useful as a demonstration of the kind of angry panic that makes the Raiders the Raiders every single year. They're running out of ways to surprise us, but this one stuck the landing in a new way, both in timing and bulk.

Now the fun turns into something new and very Raideresque – they guess their next reaction to the ongoing free fall. They've been demoted, they've traded and now they've fought their way to two wins and seven losses. There's no sense that the record doesn't reflect the team's performance, and there aren't many new opportunities for Pierce to express his displeasure with what he created and what his superiors perpetuated. Have the players' cars towed away after a lackluster training session? Sublet the locker room on Airbnb and let the players shower and change outside? Forfeiting the Jaguars game three days before Christmas and then claiming that the players don't deserve the right to lose in the NFL? Watching Pierce plot out his next angry move, good or bad, may even make the Raiders visible again, in that “YouTube video of a flash flood in a foreign land” kind of way, but the overarching truth remains, as they are always was:

You work for the Raiders so that the Raiders have the right to work for you at some point.