Josh McDaniels' nightmare season gets worse with loss to Jeff Saturday's Colts

BOSTON -- Josh McDaniels has been an NFL coach for 20 years. He called the plays for the most explosive offense in NFL history, earning the trust of the greatest quarterback in NFL history while working in concert with maybe the greatest coach in NFL history. His NFL experience is immense.

Jeff Saturday? He was a very good center during the 2000s. He's been a good football analyst on ESPN for a while. He spent a few years coaching his son's high school team, but unlike McDaniels, his coaching résumé is probably the thinnest that an NFL head coach has ever had.

Also unlike McDaniels, Saturday didn't inherit a very good football team when he agreed to be the Colts' head coach last week. Whereas McDaniels took the helm for a team that went to the playoffs last year with an interim head coach before adding arguably the best receiver in football, Saturday took over a team that was 3-5-1, had just lost three in a row, was using Sam Ehlinger at quarterback, and was so bad that ... hiring Jeff Saturday seemed like the best course of action.

Surely, despite all of McDaniels' struggles this season, he'd be able to get his guys to pick up a win over the spiraling Colts to at least gain back some respectability. 

Ah, but the flip side of that expectation is that when the opposite result turns up, the reaction is doubly fierce.

And, as expected, after the Raiders lost 25-20 at home against Jeff Saturday and the Colts, McDaniels has been the target of quite a bit of ridicule around the nation.

"Josh McDaniels is a joke, Mike Mayock is the punchline, and the Raiders are a laughing stock," an SB Nation headline reads on Monday.

"It Is Unforgivable That Josh McDaniels's Raiders Lost to Jeff Saturday's Colts," says a Sports Illustrated headline.

"I think I know Mark Davis has inherited one trait from his father-impatience-and that doesn't bode well for Josh McDaniels, who is 2-7 with wins over two of the worst teams in football, Denver and Houston," Peter King wrote for NBC.

This tweet is out there:

And these ones:

Plus, many, many tweets from Raiders fans that aren't suitable for rebroadcast on a family website.

Clearly, even for those who had low expectations for McDaniels in his second head coaching stint, it was hard to imagine the season playing out like this. The Raiders are 2-7, with their only wins coming against the Broncos (who have their own nightmare of a head coaching hire in Nathan Hackett) and the perpetually tanking Texans. They've lost to some good teams, like the Chiefs and Titans, but they've also lost to the Saints, Jaguars and Colts in the past three weeks. Outside of their wins over the Raiders, those three teams have a combined record of 7-19-1.

It's a bit of a disaster.

The 46-year-old McDaniels is running out of words to explain the situation.

"No. I mean ... no," McDaniels said when asked if he could explain the 2-7 record, noting that he sounds like a broken record. "You know, there's a lot of things that go into these games. ... Look, I mean, that's the National Football League. You either make the plays and you win. And if you don't, you don't. And the same thing with coaching. You know, if there's a call here or there that you make that works, then you can obviously help your team out. We're just, obviously, there's too many of these where it's continuing to happen. So we're gonna have to find a better formula here to close games."

McDaniels -- as he just about always has done -- accepted the blame as the head coach of the team.

"It always starts with us, it starts with me," he said. "So I'm gonna do everything I can do to try to figure out what we can do better to change the results."

Under normal circumstances, a head coach in McDaniels' position might be looking at a stunning midseason firing this week. Yet with the Raiders having to fire Jon Gruden after completing less than half of his 10-year, $100 million contract, owner Mark Davis has to be extra hesitant to pull the plug on McDaniels in year one of his four-year contract. His exact salary isn't public, but he was one of, if not the highest-paid assistant coaches when he was running New England's offense, so it's reasonable to deduce there's a significant amount of money remaining on his contract in Vegas.

Still, with Raiders fans being angry, with Derek Carr crying at the podium after mid-November loss to a dreadful Colts team, things are bad as they could possibly be in year one of stint two for McDaniels as a head coach. It's going to have to turn around significantly if he hopes to last longer in his second head coaching job than he did in his first.

UPDATE: Mark Davis spoke to the Las Vegas Journal-Review and lent his full support to McDaniels, saying, "As far as Josh goes, I have no issues." Davis added, "I like Josh. I think he's doing a fantastic job. That's why I hired him." So a change is not imminent. Not this week, at least.