They've Already Won More Than All of Last Year. That's Not the Argument.

The milestone arrived quietly, as these things often do. Somewhere in the third week of the 2026 season, the Raiders matched their entire 2025 win total. Three games, three wins, done. A franchise that went 3–14 last year — that lost ten consecutive games between October and late December, that finished outscored by nearly a touchdown per contest — has already equaled what took seventeen weeks to accumulate. The temptation to treat that as a story is understandable. It is not the story.

Here is what I keep returning to, the same number I've been circling in this column since September: Las Vegas went 2–5 in one-score games last season. Twenty-nine percent. That was the fracture line, the place where the roster's actual talent met the team's inability to execute when the margin closed to nothing. It wasn't about being outclassed — it was about being outfinished. And the only thing that matters about this 3–0 start is whether those three wins are evidence that the finishing problem has been solved, or whether they're three games that happened to stay out of reach long enough.

I wrote two weeks ago that this start was a promise, not a verdict. I meant it then and I mean it more now. Three games is too small a sample to know whether the Raiders have genuinely rewired the execution failures that cost them seven winnable games in 2025. What we know is that the conditions for those failures still exist. The depth concerns at wide receiver and tight end that plagued this roster haven't vanished. Jackson Powers-Johnson is out. Dont'e Thornton Jr. is on Injured Reserve. Brock Bowers — who was the most reliable weapon this offense had last season, 680 yards and seven touchdowns in just twelve games — has returned, which matters enormously, but his presence doesn't automatically close fourth-quarter gaps when the defense needs a stop and the quarterback needs to be right.

The quarterback question is its own quiet pressure point. Kirk Cousins is 38 years old, running a position that punishes age most ruthlessly in the moments that require the sharpest decisions — which is to say, exactly the moments that defined last year's close-game collapses. Geno Smith threw 19 touchdowns against 17 interceptions across fifteen games in 2025. That turnover number is a problem that doesn't disappear with a winning record; it resurfaces in the fourth quarter of a game where one decision separates the outcome. Fernando Mendoza is in the building now, the future locked in at four years and $57.27 million fully guaranteed, but the future doesn't play Sunday.

My read is this: the Raiders have earned nothing except the right to keep being watched. Three wins is real. Matching last year's total is real. But the 2025 season wasn't defined by the wins — it was defined by the seven one-score games they couldn't close, and the ten-game losing streak that followed when the margin for error disappeared entirely. The schedule will tighten. The games will get closer. And when they do, the only number that will tell you whether this team has actually changed is the one that broke them before.