**Two Wins, and the Raiders Are Doing the One Thing They Couldn't Do Last Year**

The 2025 Raiders went 2–5 in one-score games. That number was the clearest way to describe what went wrong — not the talent, not the scheme, just the inability to finish when finishing was required. So the fact that Las Vegas is sitting at 2–0 under Klint Kubiak, with the wins apparently coming against real resistance, is worth noting on its own terms.

It's two games. Nobody is printing playoff tickets. But the 2025 version of this team lost ten straight at one point and never strung together anything that looked like competent execution in a tight spot. Whatever Kubiak has installed — and the offseason suggested a genuine philosophical reset, not just a roster shuffle — it is at minimum producing a different result in the early going.

The roster still has real questions around it. Bowers has been the week-to-week story all month, O'Connell is out, and the defensive rebuild is a work in progress after Devin White left for Detroit and the depth chart got remade almost from scratch. None of that has gone away. But a 2–0 start with this much uncertainty around the skill positions is a data point Kubiak's staff earned.

Watch the next two weeks. If the Raiders can stay competitive in close games through a month of the schedule, that 2025 close-game number starts to look like a solved problem rather than a structural flaw. If they can't, it was always just variance.