Tom Telesco was introduced as the new General Manager of the Raiders on Wednesday and that meant he was sitting beside head coach Antonio Pierce rather than watching Pierce help put an end to his time as the G.M. of the Chargers.
Pierce and the Raiders slaughtered the Chargers 63-21 in Week 15 of the regular season and Telesco was fired along with head coach Brandon Staley the next day. On Wednesday, Pierce said that he brought the game up “right away” when he met Telesco as part of the hiring process and that Telesco stayed “very poker faced” in response.
While that was an adversarial moment, Pierce then made it clear that he knows the two men have to be well aligned if they are going to have longer runs than the last couple of Raiders regimes.
“As this relationship grows, like anything else, it’s going to have its ups and downs,” Pierce said, via Paul Gutierrez of ESPN.com. “We’ve got to be adults and grown men about it. We’ve got to hash it out. We’ve got to understand our roles, check our egos at the door, like everybody else in the building, but understand that we’ve got a plan, and that plan is to do it together, be hand in hand with it. Obviously, if he goes down, I go down. That’s just how it is. That’s the nature of the beast. We get it. But that’s not our plan. Our plan is to win, put a team in place that is competitive each and every week and gives ourselves an opportunity to win.”
It’s rare for someone to get a second chance as a G.M. in the NFL and it’s rare to see an interim head coach parley his chance into a full-time job, but the Raiders are banking on their unlikely partnership being a winning one in the years to come.
