Seahawks offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak confirmed he will be the next Las Vegas Raiders head coach during an on-field interview Sunday night following Seattle's 29-13 victory over New England in the Super Bowl.
“You guys know I'm going to Las Vegas,” Kubiak told NFL Network. “I'm fired up about it. Hell yeah, I'm going. Of course, I'm going.”
Kubiak and the Raiders began working toward finalizing an agreement a week ago for him to take the job, a person with knowledge of the discussions said at the time.
The person spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because no contract was in place and no announcement could be made until after the Super Bowl in Santa Clara, California.
Just after the Super Bowl, as it turned out.
The 38-year-old Kubiak will be the third coach in three seasons for the Raiders and fifth full-time leader since they moved to Las Vegas in 2020. He succeeds Pete Carroll, who went 3-14 in one season in Las Vegas after a storied run with Seattle that included two Super Bowl appearances and one championship.
Kubiak likely will be counted on to mold Fernando Mendoza, who led Indiana to the national championship, into the franchise quarterback the organization has long sought. The Raiders own the top pick in this year’s draft, and they are expected to use that selection on the Heisman Trophy winner.
The front office has more than $91 million in salary cap space to surround Mendoza with talent, the second-highest amount in the league, according to overthecap.com.
It was Kubiak’s work with Sam Darnold that got the Raiders’ attention. Darnold, taken third overall by the New York Jets in the 2018 NFL draft, had been considered a bust until leading Minnesota to a 14-win season in 2024. But the Vikings moved on from Darnold, and he proved that season was no fluke, winning 14 games in the regular season with Seattle and three more in the playoffs to hoist the Lombardi Trophy.
Kubiak’s father, Gary, coached Denver to the Super Bowl title in the 2015 seasons, and he played quarterback for the Broncos from 1983-91. Gary and Klint Kubiak will be the 10th father-son pair to serve as NFL head coaches, including interim coaches.
Kubiak also has two brothers who are on staffs of other NFL teams — Klay with San Francisco and Klein with Dallas. Klay Kubiak, the 49ers’ offensive coordinator, also interviewed with the Raiders.
The Raiders have been searching for a path back to their glory days. Three Lombardi Trophies sit in the team’s facility, but the Raiders haven’t won a playoff game since their last Super Bowl appearance in the 2002 season. They have made the postseason just twice since then, most recently in the 2021 season.
Owner Mark Davis, frustrated at the lack of success, put the search in the hands of minority owner Tom Brady and general manager John Spytek.
AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl
Seattle Seahawks offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak speaks during a news conference on Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2026, in San Jose, Calif., ahead of Super Bowl 60 between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy (AP) — Lindsey Vonn knows the Olympic downhill course better than anyone.
She’s won a record 12 World Cup races on the Olympia delle Tofane track — split evenly between six downhills and six super-Gs — and has a total of 20 podium results there, stretching back to her very first podium on the entire circuit in 2004.
So how did the 41-year-old American standout lose control just 12.5 seconds into her run and crash so spectacularly at the Milan Cortina Winter Games on Sunday?
Here’s what happened and why:
The highlight of the downhill course is the Tofana schuss, a narrow chute between two walls of Dolomite rock where the skiers accelerate to 80 mph (130 kph).
But the real key to the Olympia delle Tofane track comes above the schuss, where there’s a key right turn that includes an uphill stretch. That’s where Vonn went down.
“It’s incredibly reverse banked,” said Kristian Ghedina, the Cortina native and former racer who grew up in a home just below the finish line. “That’s where your speed for the rest of the course gets determined and if you don’t take the right trajectory it makes a huge difference because you end up going uphill.”
Vonn was fighting that reverse bank and trending slightly uphill when she got rocked into the air by a bump, causing her to clip the fourth gate with her right side.
That’s when the real disaster started to unfold.
Vonn tried to twist and regain her balance in mid-air but landed awkwardly with her skis perpendicular to the fall line, ensuring a brutal fall. She tumbled over, got bounced into the air again and landed on her neck area and slid down a ways before coming to a stop in the middle of the course, away from the safety netting but clearly in serious trouble.
Hours later, Vonn underwent surgery for a broken left leg and was in stable condition.
“It’s super flat after it so the goal is to be as close to that gate as possible and she really nailed the turn but she was too close to it so she got hooked into it," Norwegian skier Kajsa Vickhoff Lie said of the gate. “But that’s how it is with the Olympics, you really want to be on the limit and she was a little bit over the limit.”
While it’s always bumpy in that section, this year the final bump is “more of a kicker,” Lie noted, which is why Vonn got popped up suddenly into the air.
“I watched the video, and probably like anybody else, saw that she went through that panel, that uphill double, and for sure kicked her in the air and there was a pretty significant fall after that,” head U.S. ski coach Paul Kristofic told The Associated Press.
Women's race director Peter Gerdol said the section where Vonn lost control was “not really more different than other years.”
“This is the Cortina downhill and this year we’re talking about the Olympics,” he told AP. “It’s awarding Olympic medals so has to be somehow challenging.”
Had attention been paid to controlling the size of that bump?
“Not severely,” Gerdol said. “Because actually today, all the athletes went through quite easily. Lindsey made a mistake and it happens. It can happen in any section of the course. It happened there but it could have been in another.”
When she came to a stop, Vonn's skis were facing in opposite directions, still attached to her bindings. She then moved her left arm toward her body and was lying there alone and virtually immobile until help arrived after some tense moments. She received care for long minutes before she was airlifted away by helicopter.
The mandatory safety air bag inflated under her racing suit during the crash, supplier Dainese confirmed to the AP. The air bag, which is triggered by a complicated algorithm when racers lose control, may have softened her landing.
It was evident that the air bag had opened, because Vonn’s chest appeared puffed out when she was lying on the snow.
Marco Pastore, who works on the safety system for Dainese, said the air bag deflates after about 20 seconds, so that likely happened while Vonn was lying on the snow after her crash. Eventually, Dainese will try to retrieve a sort of “black box” sensor that could reveal data on the fall.
“She was wearing it when they took her away in the helicopter,” Pastore said. “So we haven’t gotten the data yet.”
AP Sports Writer Steve Douglas contributed to this report.
AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
United States' Lindsey Vonn is airlifted away after a crash during an alpine ski women's downhill race, at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
