The Raiders scored zero points, but it's worse than that

The Raiders played the worst game of football in over 25 years. The Giants had a collapse that felt like a game from 100 years ago. PLUS! A new strategy for playing in London.

Oct 20, 2025

I will not be providing weekly Jets Loss Updates. I do not want to relive this week’s cruelties, which are just a slightly different array of slings and arrows. Did they make a quarterback change? None of your business. Did they score more points than last week? I will not be telling you about it. Once again, I demand the dignity to suffer in peace.

Quick programming note before we get to the NFL newsletter: I accidentally published yesterday’s college football newsletter without a section about Washington State losing on a bizarre fair catch technicality. I wrote it in a word document and forgot to transfer it into Substack before hitting send. Surely this shocked and devastated the thousands of you who expect me to report on any and all rules SNAFUS, and for that I apologize. I can’t update the email in your inbox, but the post is updated at this link.

Party Like It’s (the) 1999 (Cleveland Browns)

In one way, it’s easy to describe how bad the Las Vegas Raiders were on Sunday. They were shut out 31-0, because they scored zero points. That is the fewest points you can score. Until football allows for teams to score negative points — say, turning safeties into deductions rather than points for the opposing offense — any team that scores zero points in a game will tie the all-time NFL record for offensive futility. If you watched NFL RedZone to see the Raiders on Sunday, you only would’ve been served up sacks and fumbles. It would have been like going to a nature preserve to glimpse a rare bird, only to see them dead in the claws of a feasting hawk.

Luckily, football is a language that can describe failure in many ways. The Raiders had one of the worst performances in NFL history on Sunday, and the only reason they did not set various NFL records for Football Badness is the cursed rebirth of the Cleveland Browns, whose debut game in 1999 was a 43-0 shutout.

The Raiders ran 30 offensive plays, the second-fewest in NFL history. Only the 1999 Browns had fewer in that debut game. That’s a pretty solid indicator your team played terribly, because it means they couldn’t stay on the field for long — their longest drive of the day was five plays and 16 yards — and they also couldn’t get stops to get the ball back. The Raiders had just three first downs, the fewest since 2001. You guessed it, the Browns had two first downs in their 1999 debut.

I’m going to post the SportsCenter highlights from that 1999 Browns debut, read by Rich Eisen With Hair. However, before we get to that video, I want you to guess how the Browns were introduced in their first game back, WITHOUT scrolling down. Do you think they had:

A big pyrotechnic display?
A performance by a band from Cleveland’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall of Fame?
An iconic intro song hyping everybody up, a la the 1990s Bulls and “Sirius”?
A 1999-era computer graphic intro like this one?
A parade of legends from the original Cleveland Browns?

So you don’t accidentally glimpse the answer, here’s a vertical buffer in the form of the Wikipedia photo for Ty Detmer, who started at QB and threw an interception on Cleveland’s first drive.

*Yes, this is the Wikipdia picture for Ty Detmer.*

Unlike the price, all of those guesses are wrong. The 1999 Cleveland Browns were introduced in their debut game by Drew Carey:

Anyway, let’s get back to the Raiders.

Like the 1999 Browns, many parts of this Raiders team were new or re-born. They brought in Pete Carroll as the head coach and Chip Kelly as the offensive coordinator, both returning to the NFL after time away from the league. They signed Geno Smith in free agency to reunite him with Carroll, who helped Smith revitalize his career in Seattle. They even made a big deal about Tom Brady, who bought a small stake in the team and promised to use his celebrated Football Brain to help the team improve.

All these respected professionals were supposed to bring competence to what has been an unserious organization in recent years. The Raiders weren’t expected to contend for a championship, but they were at least supposed to raise their floor from after seemingly bottoming out last season with a 10-game losing streak. But now the Raiders seem to be bottoming out even harder. Again, this was literally the worst NFL game not personally introduced by Drew Carey.

My personal scapegoat? Brennan Carroll, Pete’s son, given the titles of offensive line coach and run game coordinator after serving as the offensive coordinator for the Washington Huskies’ 104th-ranked scoring offense last season. This year, without Carroll, UW has improved to 34th. Always blame a nepo baby when you can.

But like the 1999 Browns, so many things are going wrong for the Raiders that it’s tough to diagnose who to blame. They can’t even stay on the field long enough for us to figure out who’s doing the worst job.

Last week I wrote a guest newsletter for Fantasy Genius. FG gave me access to their tools for my high school fantasy league, and I’ve gotta say: It’s a total game-changer.

Fantasy Genius takes all the data from your fantasy league (including ESPN, Yahoo, and Sleeper) and pumps out all sorts of stats, charts, and historical analyses. It tells you stuff like:

The actual best team in the history of your league
Who’s actually good at making managerial decisions
Which of your friends do you dominate year after year, and who should you consider your closest rivals

Fantasy Genius also sends out weekly newsletters (like the one I wrote!) that are customized for your league, packed with info on who made the worst bench decisions and who had the luckiest win that week.

It’s the ultimate add-on for your league, and the primo package is only $3.50 a month per league. That’s roughly 30 cents per team in a 12-team league! You probably spent more on pizza for the draft! I can’t recommend it enough.

Less time in London

At this point, international games are a part of NFL life: You go overseas, you hold a youth clinic teaching foreign children how to throw a football, you smile while taking one bite of a local food item. But teams still have differing philosophies about how to handle trans-Atlantic travel, and the Jags and Rams took polar opposite approaches ahead of Sunday’s game in London.

The Jag-yoo-ahhs have made London their second home over the years, essentially volunteering to be the NFL’s unofficial home team in England. (I initially thought this was why Esme Morgan was such a big Jaguars fan, but no, she just likes teal.) They’ve played in 14 of the 42 London games — one-third! — including two games each in the 2023 and 2024 seasons. They seem to think getting comfortable in England is an advantage: They flew to London on Monday morning and basically spent the entire week in England ahead of their game.

Meanwhile, the Rams made the trip later than any team ever, spending game week in Baltimore (practicing on a half-field at Camden Yards, and reimbursing the Orioles for the cost of re-sodding this offseason) and flying in Saturday morning.

The game was a huge W for the “get there as late as possible” strategy. Even though it was only the second London game ever between teams with winning records — America: We love exporting slop — it was a total non-contest, with Los Angeles jumping out to a 28-0 lead and eventually winning 35-7. Matthew Stafford threw a London-record five touchdowns, despite only sleeping one night overseas, while the Jags looked listless in their home-away-from-home.

The result might one-shot the entire debate about how best to approach international games. From here on out, everybody is going to do plane-sleep-football-plane. They’re not even gonna realize they’re in a foreign country before the ball is kicked. No team bonding, no photo ops, no teaching British children how to throw a football. No NFL player is ever going to eat a fish and/or chip ever again. If the players notice the people have accents and the cars are on the wrong side of the street, they’ve been there too long.

Broncos-Giants

Here are all the teams in NFL history that have allowed 33 points in the fourth quarter of a game:

The 1925 Milwaukee Badgers, who were asked to play an extra game by the Chicago Cardinals, who needed one more win to post a better record than the Pottsville Maroons and win the NFL championship. The Badgers had already ended their season, so the Cardinals paid a handful of high school players to suit up as pretend pros in Badger uniforms. The gambit caused such a big scandal that it almost led to the disbandment of a nascent NFL. (The Milwaukee Badgers also scored as many points as this year’s Wisconsin Badgers have the last two weeks: Zero.)
The 2022 Colts, coached by not-a-football-coach Jeff Saturday. They committed four turnovers on four possessions, one of them a scoop-and-score fumble
The 2007 Bears, who threw a pick-6, allowed a kickoff return, and scored a kickoff return touchdown of their own to give the other team the ball even faster to score more touchdowns.
The 2025 Giants, who somehow managed to give up 33 fourth quarter points despite allowing zero special teams or defensive touchdowns, scoring zero quick-strike TDs of their own, and with a roster comprised of professional adults rather than high schoolers.

And the Broncos needed every one of those 33 fourth-quarter points to beat the Giants, 33-32. The easy scapegoat in New York is Jude McAtamney, the former Gaelic football player from Derry who missed two extra points in a one-point loss. McAtamney is the Giants’ backup kicker, playing because of an injury to Graham Gano. (It’s unclear why the Giants played him despite having Younghoe Koo, who is 55-for-56 on extra points over the last three seasons.)

But really, the Giants lost for a lot of reasons. They had a 19-0 lead heading into the fourth quarter, and just needed to play normal football. Instead, their defense totally collapsed, and rookie QB Jaxson Dart threw an atrocious interception directly to a Broncos linebacker. McAtamney’s second missed extra point was just the icing.

I think the Giants’ problem was that their vibes were simply too good. A month ago, they were 0-3 and putting up league-worst offensive numbers with the desiccated husk of Russell Wilson at QB. Then they turned to Dart, started playing rookie running back Cam Skattebo, and then plowed through the defending Super Bowl champions in a convincing home victory last week. A convincing win over the playoff-bound Broncos would have been too much. You don’t get to go from “bad and hopeless and grim” to “good and fun and cool” in three weeks. It’s unfair to the rest of us! This loss had to happen.

The Chiefs tried a dastardly trick in that 31-0 win over the Raiders. They lined up on fourth-and-1 and ran a bunch of those dumb pre-snap motions that teams use when they’re trying to draw an opponent offsides with no intention of actually running a play. Then Patrick Mahomes stood up and yelled, loudly, for everybody to hear, “THAT NEVER FUCKING WORKS, MAN!” (True, it never fucking works.) But the move was a double-bluff. Mahomes quickly got his hands back under center, called for the snap, and handed off the ball for a first down.
I don’t actually think the Raiders were tricked. They were all ready when the Chiefs snapped the ball. The play was reminiscent of when the Chiefs played ring-around-the-rosie against the Raiders, but the Raiders still got in position for a TFL … only to whiff the tackle and allow a touchdown. Basically, the Chiefs keep trying stupid little tricks that don’t actually fool the Raiders but the Raiders are so bad that it works anyway.
The concerns about Jalen Hurts’ inability to throw the ball were overstated. He had 326 yards and three bomb touchdowns against the Vikings, who were starting Carson Wentz, the QB Hurts replaced in 2020:
The Miami Dolphins are 1-6 after Tua Tagovailoa threw three picks in a 31-6 loss to the Browns. Tua now has the two worst games in the NFL this season, according to ESPN’s QBR metric. The Dolphins are not the worst team in the NFL — they beat the winless Jets a few weeks ago — but the other contenders are teams with new coaching staffs or new QBs. The Dolphins have spent years building to be this bad.