The Las Vegas Raiders saw a significant improvement on both sides of the ball last season after Antonio Pierce took over for Josh McDaniels, and assistant coach Bo Hardegree certainly played a part in that.
Hardegree began serving as the quarterbacks coach in 2022 and was named the team’s interim offensive coordinator once Daniels was shown the door.
On his watch, Las Vegas averaged one more passing yard per game, 39 more rushing yards per game and gave up two less sacks per contest. The Raiders also averaged over seven more points per game.
Despite that success, Hardegree was not retained as the offensive coordinator, with the team hiring Luke Getsy instead. In fact, unless they did and it was never made public, the Raiders didn’t even interview him for the job.
The decision to not even look at Hardegree for the full-time gig was surprising to former Raiders quarterback, Brian Hoyer, who explained why.
“I was actually kind of shocked that they didn’t even look at possibly retaining Bo Hardegree, because when Bo took over as offensive coordinator middle of the year, it took a while, but things started to pick up,” Hoyer said on SiriusXM. “Obviously, we had the big game against the Chargers and then finished the year on a strong note.”
Making Hardegree’s stint as the Raiders offensive coordinator even more impressive was the fact that he had a rookie quarterback in Aidan O’Connell, who also showed improvement near the end of the season.
Hardegree moved on to become the quarterbacks coach with the Tennessee Titans, where he’ll work with promising young signal-caller Will Levis. Former Raiders assistant coach Nick Holz is the offensive coordinator there.
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