Coach Antonio Pierce of the Las Vegas Raiders has done virtually everything right since taking the reigns of Raider Nation last season on an interim basis.
Pierce earned the permanent head coaching job, and now the Raiders are marching confidently into his first offseason at the helm.
Brilliantly, he won the locker room with his genuine approach to the game people love and subsequently won over Raider Nation and, ultimately, Mark Davis.
Appearing on the Pivot podcast recently, he let Raider Nation into his mindset, and his usual openness painted a terrific picture for all to see.
“The stage, as players, is a platform,” Pierce said. “I am one of 32. They don’t all look like this, they don’t talk like this, they don’t rock like this. They didn’t do what we did.”
Of course, Pierce is 100 percent correct. He has played at a high level in the National Football League, which isn’t the case with all coaches or even most.
But Pierce isn’t about himself. Everything he does is about the team, and he opened up about how he explained that to the team.
“One of the things that I told our players is, certain people in this building can’t do what we do,” Pierce said. “We can do what they do, they can’t ever be and do what we’ve done as players. Laced some cleats up. Going out there on Sundays and going to war, going to battle with one another.
Reflectively, a humbled Pierce said: “I don’t take it lightly, I am so humbled to be honest, and honored to be in this position. More than anything else, not like a player wanting to win a Super Bowl, I want to do right. I want to set the stage for other players to have this opportunity. So they don’t look at us, and say: ‘Well, because he didn’t go to Harvard, Yale, John Cornell, he’s not an Ivy League guy, he wasn’t mister, President of his school, whatever it may be, he can lead men. He can move rocks, move stones. He can get people to do what they didn’t think that they could do. Make people believe.”
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