“It’s All Working” - Rich on the Raiders Surprising 3-0 Start to the Season

Only one person outside the Las Vegas Raiders' building saw a 3-0 start coming, and he made the prediction on this very set. Akbar Gbajabiamila, sitting next to Matt Eberflus, played the win-loss game and had the Raiders winning their first three. The crew laughed at him. Rich asked what he was smoking.

Three weeks later, the Raiders are 3-0, and Rich is the one making the bold comparison.

"What they're doing is Mahomes-ing them," Rich said. "And Kirk Cousins is Alex Smith." The Chiefs drafted Patrick Mahomes and sat him until the final week of that regular season while Smith took the team to the playoffs, with a terrific young tight end and an opportunistic defense. Rich admitted Andy Reid had a ton more experience than Klint Kubiak, but the outline is the same, and the first-year coach has company in the record book. Kubiak joined Bill Callahan in 2002 and John Madden, in the year Rich was born, as the only coaches to begin their Raiders tenure 3-0.

The bigger story is what Kubiak has done for Cousins. Cousins opened the season with his first career back-to-back three touchdown games, then threw three more touchdown passes in New Orleans. Rich asked the room how many quarterbacks age 38 or older had ever started a season with three straight three-touchdown games. Chris guessed two. TJ, playing it like The Price Is Right, went with three.

The answer was zero. "Kirk's the first," Rich said. Not even Tom Brady did it.

Which ends the Fernando Mendoza conversation for now. Rich recalled being asked, on this show and others, to name the week Kubiak would sit Cousins because his arm was a noodle or because the team needed to see the rookie. "Fernando is not playing if this continues," Rich said. "Period. End of story. It's that simple." Cousins does not curse, Rich noted, so his response to all of that is probably closer to "to heck with that."

The offense is not even whole yet. Brock Bowers missed the first two weeks, Cousins threw three touchdowns in both anyway, and the Raiders won both. Bowers came back against the Saints and caught 10 passes for 116 yards.

Rich had one more trivia question. Since the merger, in the common draft era, how many teams had started 3-0 after drafting a quarterback first overall? TJ, catching on, said nobody. Correct again. The Raiders are the first, which Rich noted is too long to fit on a banner. "It's going to be read like an eye chart."

The defense is pulling its weight. The Raiders had four takeaways in New Orleans, all in the fourth quarter, the first team to do that in a quarter since the 2002 Steelers. It is also the first time they have forced three turnovers in back-to-back games since 2011. They snapped a franchise-worst streak of 39 regular season games without scoring 30 points.

Now comes the real test: the 3-0 Kansas City Chiefs, who in Rich's words "treat this place in Vegas like it's their western white house." Kubiak, for his part, is not raising banners. "It's a 17-game season, so we can't be happy or satisfied with this win," he said. "We know what's coming to our place next week in the Chiefs. So, we just take it one game at a time."

It is all working, Rich said, in a way nobody saw coming. Nobody except Gbajabiamila, who also predicted the Raiders would lose their next three before beating the Rams. He is not backing down, either. According to the crew, he posts the second the Raiders win a game.