To take the old adage and twist it a bit in the back shop: You can’t hope to beat the Las Vegas Raiders because they’re so easy to contain. The last person to learn that lesson is their 12-game-old head coach.

Antonio Pierce was billed as the franchise’s newest savior, the coach this historically lackluster roster would turn to after enduring The Josh McDaniels Experience; with Pierce as his model, the team would quiver with joyful devotion to a greater cause. So trusting. So naive. But these are the Raiders, who said it while steadfastly refusing to do so for two decades and now changing. This is an organization that goes from “Hey, who’s the new guy?” to “Hey, when are we getting a new guy?” with unusual rapidity. That’s why, since losing Super Bowl The 37th in ’Ought Two, Raiders coaches have gone an average of 26 games between hiring and firing. That’s barely a season and a half.

Pierce is halfway there, but now he knows what’s going on. Gravity is a mean bastard.

After watching his team register a DNP-DGAF in a half-hearted 36-22 loss to the incomprehensibly bad Carolina Panthers, Pierce resorted to the modern coach’s last motivational resort: “I’m sick of most of you guys by now, and my only regret is that I can’t fire you all right now.” Now comes an inspirational speech to scare the boys and get them out on the beach.

But let’s not paraphrase when we can quote directly: “I think there were definitely some individuals who made business decisions, and we’ll be making business decisions going forward,” he said during the traditional Podium Of Shame after the Raiders’ game. “We got beat up. I would have booed us, too.”

Oh, did we mention this was the Raiders’ home opener after an equally impressive win over Baltmore? They came home as the most mortal of locks, a team that had been outscored 73-13 in its first two games and had just traded its ostensible franchise quarterback, the first overall pick just a year ago, for a redheaded redhead, possibly at the behest of the most meddlesome and least football-savvy owner in the sport. What could possibly go wrong?

We’re going to wait here in the corner until you stop laughing and pointing at us. That’s rude.

The whole thing was. The details of the game are pretty standard: the Raiders allowed 450 yards to the worst team in football, forced no turnovers, and had the ball for barely 24 minutes. Pierce is right that they did get their asses “beaten.” This sort of thing happens to the Raiders all the time; they win barely a third of their games, they’re the second-worst team in the sport since that Super Bowl loss, and they’ve allowed nearly 2,000 more points than they’ve scored in that span. In the grand scheme of things, “Panthers 36, Raiders 22 in the home opener” is exactly who the Raiders are, and what they’ve been for the last four presidents.

But Pierce, positive motivator and relative coaching novice that he is, hadn’t gotten the raw picture until Sunday. Onstage, after being trashed by (and there’s no nice way to say this) Andy Dalton, it seemed to suddenly dawn on Pierce that the same crippling malaise that is Raiders football is still Raiders football. He decided that yelling at them in the privacy of the locker room wasn’t shame enough — a hopeful gesture in itself, because it suggests that they could, in fact, be shamed.

So Pierce did it for all to see and hear, his willful distaste turning him into a menacing metronome. When a college-educated softball pitcher asked him what positive he could take from the game, Pierce said tersely, “Nothing.” Even in Dallas, the players at least care enough to rat each other out.

None of the 13 coaches the Raiders have hired over the past 21 years have figured out how to sufficiently embrace/inspire/fear this team; Rich Bisaccia, who inspired a brief leap in competence as interim coach, seems to have surprised them more in retrospect. That Pierce, who had a similar leap as interim coach and was reportedly the locker room’s choice to replace McDaniels, is hitting his first motivational wall three games into his first full season is not a healthy sign for the future. Then again, what would that be, assuming “actually beating the Panthers” is off the table?

The NFL is a strange place right now, even with its own typically warped atmosphere; almost everything about it has regressed to a dull gray average after just three spins of the wheel. The reigning champion Chiefs are undefeated, but in those victories they’ve won by just seven, one, and five. The Vikings are—oh, but let’s leave that to Comrade Magary and his delusions. But even in a season of room-temperature parity, the Raiders are never not the Raiders, which means Pierce’s manifesto will likely land like all the others—with the players giving him sidelong glances and more 85 percent effort.

The team may believe in Pierce as a concept, and it seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea at the time, but the Raiders as a reality are exactly that, and will continue to be until they prove otherwise. If Pierce shows a handful of release letters to his roster without the actual authority to distribute them—and he’s not the general manager, after all—the rest of his season will be a painful one by default, and the release letter he finds might just be his own.

After, like the typical Raider coach, 26 games.