The Raiders Are 3-0 Again. Why Has 3-0 Been So Rare In Las Vegas?

The Las Vegas Raiders won three games in all of last season. This season they've won three games in three weeks, and the latest one arrived in about the most chaotic way possible.

Down 27-16 to the Saints in the third quarter, the Raiders scored 19 straight points and won 35-27 in New Orleans, with four fourth-quarter takeaways doing most of the work. That made them 3-0 for only the second time since 2002.

A start this rare needs context

The Raiders' last 3-0 start came in 2021, five seasons ago. Before that you'd have to go back to 2002, the year they reached the Super Bowl. Since then the franchise has made the playoffs only twice, and its last AFC West title is now 23 years old.

That's the honest answer to why 3-0 has been so rare. A team needs to be good at least briefly to open with three wins, and the Raiders haven't been good very often for a very long time. They've missed the postseason four years running.

The churn behind the scenes has been just as heavy. The Raiders opened this season with their sixth head coach since 2021 and their fifth different opening-day quarterback in as many seasons. Stability wasn't exactly the brand.

What Sunday said about the team

Klint Kubiak is a first-time head coach who took over after the team let Pete Carroll go following a single season, and his offence is working through a veteran quarterback. Kirk Cousins threw for 248 yards and three touchdowns against New Orleans, which makes him the first Raiders quarterback to throw at least three touchdown passes in each of the first three games of a year.

Brock Bowers is the other big piece. The tight end came back from a knee procedure that had kept him out for two weeks, caught 10 passes for 116 yards and scored the four-yard touchdown that made it 35-27. Tight ends caught six touchdowns in that game, which ties an NFL record. The only other time it happened was a Chargers-Raiders game in 1981.

The defence did its share too. Jeremy Chinn's strip-sack on fourth-and-1 ended a Saints streak of eight straight fourth-down conversions dating back to last season.

What 3-0 does and doesn't tell you

Now for some caution. The Raiders' first two wins came against Miami and the Chargers, and neither opponent looks like a contender right now. The Saints game turned on a fourth quarter full of the other side's mistakes.

But history leans their way. NFL Research says 75 percent of teams that started 3-0 since 1990 made the playoffs. For a franchise that hasn't seen January football in four years, that number changes the conversation, even if it's a statistic and not a prediction. The question stops being whether Las Vegas can compete and becomes how far the run can go.

The real test comes next week. Kansas City, also 3-0, visits Las Vegas with first place in the AFC West on the line. A win makes the Raiders the most interesting story in the conference. A loss makes 3-0 look like a pleasant little fluke against a soft opening schedule.

That's what an early unbeaten record does for a struggling franchise. It doesn't tell you what a team is. It only tells you what the fans are allowed to start hoping for, and for a fan base with a very long list of reasons to stay away, that's worth a lot.

Even so, the old scoreboard still hangs over this one. The Raiders went 3-14 last year, and nobody in Las Vegas has forgotten it.

Which is the more honest number for this team right now: the 3-0 they've just posted, or the 3-14 that came before it?