There were critics, it seems, of the Las Vegas postgame locker room cigar celebration that erupted in the locker room after the Week 9 victory over the Giants, a thorough 30-6 drubbing of a mostly hapless team. The victory was more than that, though, for the Raiders’ Davante Adams, who helped lead the player push to get the team to fire Josh McDaniels and put Antonio Pierce in as interim coach.
One such critic, Ben Volin of the Boston Globe, wrote that, “Raiders players dance on McDaniels’ grave, and Mark Davis ensures no self respecting coach will ever want to coach his team.”
Raiders players dance on McDaniels’ grave, and Mark Davis ensures no self respecting coach will ever want to coach his team
To paraphrase Davante Adams in his Raiders press conference on Wednesday: Pfft.
To actually quote what Adams had to say on the subject: “I look at it as, at the end of the day, anybody who’s dealt with the type of adversity we have this year, the ups and downs, all the negative attention, the drama and stuff, they’ll never understand why we had that feeling and why it led to cigars being lit in the locker room.
“Obviously not everybody agrees with it, but you won’t last too long in this league if you care about what other people think and how they feel about what you do.”
Raiders’ Davante Adams: Cigars ‘Hard to Understand’ for Some
The cigars were the brainchild of Maxx Crosby, the star Raiders defensive end whom Davante Adams praised profusely on Wednesday. As Adams saw it, the cigars were more symbolic of the collective relief that the team felt after laboring through the first eight weeks of the season under McDaniels, who had lost the attention and respect of his players.
The relief had shown on the field, with the Raiders’ most complete performance of the season. They outgained the Giants, 334-277, in yardage and forced two turnovers. They committed only four penalties, a season low, and racked up eight sacks (three by Crosby).
The Raiders got an efficient, 209-yard performance from rookie quarterback Aidan O’Connell (who only needed 34 yards from Davante Adams), and got 98 rushing yards from running back Josh Jacobs, his best game of the year.
Kicker Anders Carlson knocked in all six of his kicks on the afternoon.
So cigars? They were in order. “To me the most important part of the how are the guys celebrating, look what they did together as a unit,” Pierce said on Sunday.
Goal Is to Make Winning ‘Normal’
One thing that the Raiders’ Davante Adams has learned from a decade in the NFL, which includes six Pro Bowl selections and 11 playoff appearances, is not to worry too much about what others think. There was significant noise outside the Raiders locker room all season.
Now that the Raiders had an excellent week, cigars and all, they’re not going to start listening to that outside noise.
“If you’re not a part of this team, it’s going to be hard to understand why (the cigars were) necessary to happen,” Adams said from the Raiders facility. “You know, we not going to light up cigars every single week but based off of the changes that were made, and the way this team rallied together, it was definitely warranted for something like that to happen.
“Now, we just got to make it normal, that way we don’t have to light cigars after regular-season wins.”
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Raiders’ Davante Adams Fires Back at Cigar Celebration Critics