Three Wins Doesn't Mean the Problem Is Solved

The Raiders have matched their 2025 win total in three weeks. That is a real thing. It is also, at this moment, the least interesting thing about where this team stands.

Here is the number that actually matters going forward: 29%. That was Las Vegas's win rate in one-score games last season — two wins in seven tries — and it was the clearest diagnosis of why a roster with genuine offensive talent finished 3–14. Not the margin of defeat in the blowouts. Not the losing streak that ran from October into late December. The tight games. The ones where execution at the margins separates contenders from pretenders, and the Raiders kept finding ways to be the latter. I've written about this three times in the past two weeks, and I'll keep writing about it until the sample size forces me to stop or the Raiders prove the point moot.

What's changed structurally is real. Brock Bowers is back, and as I argued after his return, his presence removes the most convenient excuse for offensive limitations. Last season across 12 games, Bowers hauled in 64 receptions for 680 yards and 7 touchdowns — the kind of production that bends defenses and creates the leverage plays that close games. Without him, Las Vegas had to win differently. With him back in the lineup, the offense should have more answers in the fourth quarter, which is precisely when the 2025 Raiders ran out of them.

But Bowers's return also raises the stakes on what we're actually evaluating. Winning without your best weapon is one kind of evidence. Winning with him, against tightening schedules, in games that come down to a possession — that's the evidence that would actually rewrite the story. The 2025 Raiders weren't bad at football in general; they were specifically bad at the moments when football gets hardest. Geno Smith threw 19 touchdowns against 17 interceptions last year, a ratio that tends to haunt you when a drive in the final two minutes needs to be clean. That's the version of this team the 29% win rate captured.

My read is this: the 3–0 record is meaningful as a foundation and essentially meaningless as a verdict. What the Raiders have demonstrated is that they can execute when it matters in a small sample. What they haven't demonstrated is that last year's close-game failure was corrected rather than temporarily outrun. The schedule will tighten. The margins will shrink. And when a game comes down to a single possession in the fourth quarter — with Bowers on the field, with no more excuses banked — that's when we find out whether this start was a turning point or just a better opening chapter to the same story.