Raiders coaching staff: Brennan Carroll’s job as offensive line boss mission critical

Las Vegas’ trenchwork will dictate a lot of Chip Kelly’s success as offensive coordinator

Pete Carroll can wax poetic about his want to run the football. Chip Kelly can drop dimes about how his offense will attack opposing defenses, too.

The new Las Vegas Raiders head coach and offensive coordinator, respectively, will get the questions in due time and answer them accordingly. However, the desired outcomes from the Silver & Black offense are going to boil down to a singular focal point: Brennan Carroll.

The new offensive line coach’s job is mission critical to the Raiders operation as the trenchwork from his group is going to dictate a lot of what the team can and can’t do offensively. Kelly’s success as the new play caller is going to be predicated on how well Las Vegas offensive line performs.

A lot of that burden falls on the younger Carroll.

While he rejoins his father in Las Vegas, Brennan is no stranger to working with offensive linemen as he served in the assistant capacity with Pete and the Seattle Seahawks in 2020 as well as tenures as offensive line coach (and offensive coordinator) at the collegiate level in Arizona (2021-23) and most recently Washington (2024).

Brennan Carroll’s most recent work as the Huskies’ trench boss does deserve mentioning, though. He joined Jedd Fisch’s Washington staff and guided a group that lost all five starters the previous season — that Huskies offensive line won the Joe Moore Award (best OL in the country) in 2023 — and not surprisingly, Carroll’s unit struggled.

Washington’s offensive line had issues not only creating lanes for running backs (1,637 total rushing yards good for 100th in the nation) but protecting the quarterback (39 sacks, tied 116th in the nation).

Brennan’s arrival in Las Vegas comes at a time where his father Pete enters the fray as a new culture and tone setter. And fortunately for the younger Carroll, the Raiders have entrenched pieces of veteran experience at left tackle in Kolton Miller and at guard in Dylan Parham. The team also has young building blocks in 2024 NFL Draft picks Jackson Powers-Johnson (guard/center) and DJ Glaze (right tackle). Andre James, Thayer Munford Jr., and Jordan Meredith are also names competing for and getting starting snaps this past season.

How Carroll approaches building and coaching up the group up front bears watching. The Raiders decision on who starts at the pivot (James or Powers-Johnson) will have a ripple effect to the rest of the group as Power-Johnson showed versatility to man left guard when not at center. as free agency and the 2025 draft likely add more pieces to the offensive line puzzle.

Fortunately for Carroll, orchestrating the Raiders offensive line is an upward trajectory.

Las Vegas struggles up front were ever apparent in the team’s dead-last ground game which ranked 32nd in yards gained at 1,357. The Raiders offense ended up tied for fifth-most sacks allowed this past season, too, at 50. For context, the Chicago Bears allowed the most with 68.

The Raiders did show improvement up front when veteran coach Joe Philbin took over the reins as interim offensive line coach when then-head coach Antonio Pierce shook up his coaching staff with the dismissals of offensive coordinator Luke Getsy, offensive line coach James Cregg, and quarterbacks coach Rich Scangarello.

And Philbin remains listed as a coach on Pete Carroll’s ever-growing staff on the team’s official website, which means Brennan will have a solid sounding board when as the new line boss.

While Las Vegas has questions at both the quarterback and running back positions heading deeper into the offseason, no matter what Kelly decides to do with the Silver & Black, the offense will begin and end with the lifeblood — the offensive line. Check out our Matt Holder’s breakdown of Kelly’s running game, which relies on deception and attacking the opposition’s weaknesses.

Kelly’s philosophy is to set up favorable matchups for his offense — play to the team’s strengths while masking deficiencies — and that often means making situations advantageous for the offensive lineman.

And how Carroll and Kelly go about doing that will be intriguing to see.