Close Games Were the Diagnosis. Two Weeks In, Las Vegas Is Treating the Symptom.
The number that defined last season wasn't 3–14, as ugly as that final record was. It was the 29% win rate in one-score games — a 2–5 mark in contests decided by a touchdown or fewer that exposed something structural about how that team performed when execution actually had a price tag attached. You can lose blowouts because your roster is thin. You lose close games because your team can't make the plays that matter when they matter most. Those are different problems, and only one of them is fixable by adding bodies in the offseason.
Which is why the 2–0 start deserves more than a celebratory headline. It deserves scrutiny. I wrote last week that the way Las Vegas was winning told you more than the wins themselves, and I want to push that further: close-game performance is the single most honest stress test for a team that collapsed the way this one did in 2025. Blowout wins don't tell you anything. Winning ugly, winning late, winning when the margin is a possession — that's the data point that actually matters for a franchise trying to prove it's different now.
The problem with two games is that it's still a sample that fits in your pocket. Last year's Raiders were 2–5 in those situations across a full season, and even that record took months to reveal itself as a pattern rather than bad luck. The 29% close-game win rate was damning precisely because it persisted — it wasn't a bad week, it was a disposition. Two weeks of evidence in the other direction is encouraging, but it doesn't overwrite seventeen games of the opposite tendency. The honest version of optimism here is conditional: the Raiders are behaving like a team that has fixed the problem, and we need more reps to know if that's real.
What makes this start genuinely worth watching, rather than just worth noting, is the context around it. Brock Bowers is questionable, Aidan O'Connell is questionable, and Folorunso Fatukasi — the defensive tackle signed to anchor a run defense that lost Devin White to Detroit — is also listed as questionable heading into the week. Last year's team didn't just lose close games; it lost them while the roster was relatively healthy compared to what Las Vegas is navigating right now. Winning tight games with your receiving room and defensive line both operating at reduced capacity is a harder version of the test. Passing it twice doesn't make it solved, but it does make it more meaningful than two wins against soft competition with everyone healthy.
My read is this: the Raiders' 2026 season will ultimately be judged by whether the close-game collapse of 2025 was a personnel problem or a coaching and execution problem. If it was personnel — if the right players simply weren't there to make the right plays — then Ashton Jeanty's development, the Mendoza investment, and additions like Fatukasi should move the needle over time. If it was something deeper, something about how this team is built to respond under pressure, then two weeks of evidence won't hold. The number to watch isn't the record. It's what happens the next time Las Vegas is in a one-score game in the fourth quarter with something real on the line. That's when we find out which version of this team showed up in September.