HENDERSON, Nev. – The gabfest occurred serendipitously at a Las Vegas Raiders team dinner back in August after Antonio Pierce sought a place to sit and Champ Kelly offered him an open chair.

As coaches and players dined on caviar, tuna tartare and Wagyu beef at a swanky seaside Malibu, California, restaurant, Raiders linebackers coach Pierce and assistant general manager Kelly bonded in discussion about the game they both love. For more than three hours, they delved into every aspect of team building, sharing their thoughts about the futures they envisioned for themselves atop an organization someday.

Little did they know, they wouldn’t have to wait long.

In November, Raiders owner Mark Davis made major organizational changes on the field and in the front office, firing coach Josh McDaniels and general manager David Ziegler and elevating Pierce to interim head coach and Kelly to interim general manager. Along with team president Sandra Douglass Morgan, the NFL’s first Black woman in that role, the Raiders have three African Americans occupying the three most traditionally important NFL jobs at the club level, marking the first time in league history that has occurred.

Under the guidance of Davis’ father Al, who then owned the team, the Raiders had the NFL’s first Latino head coach to win a Super Bowl (Tom Flores) and the first African American coach in the league’s modern era (Art Shell). Former Raiders CEO Amy Trask was among the highest-ranking women in pro sports. Mark Davis also added to the franchise’s legacy in this area by hiring onetime general manager Reggie McKenzie, who is Black. There are signs that the Raiders’ new leaders could remain in their positions beyond this season.

As the visiting Raiders face the Kansas City Chiefs on Christmas Day at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium, the team is, unquestionably, in a much better place than it was before Davis cleaned house, people in the organization and around the league told Andscape. Pierce and Kelly have been praised for improving the Raiders’ organizational culture overnight, teaming up to lower the temperature of players who were at their wit’s end with the ineffectual McDaniels and feeling unsupported by the front office.

Pierce and Kelly have moved the football operation in one direction again, which hadn’t been the case at the Raiders’ team headquarters here for some time. Fact is, there’s much less tension in the Pierce-Kelly regime than there was when McDaniels and Ziegler ran the building, and the seeds of the turnaround were sown before appetizers were served.

Fortunately for the Raiders, Kelly’s table wasn’t full.

In Los Angeles conducting joint practices with the Rams leading to the teams’ preseason game on Aug. 19, the Raiders’ meal was, partly, a team-building exercise. Pierce and Kelly participated eagerly.

Although both were beginning their second season with the Raiders, they had not worked together in the league previously, entered the organization from vastly different paths and knew little about each other personally. That night, Kelly was the first to arrive.

“The players were trying to find their seats, so I went to the back [of the restaurant] and I found a table,” Kelly said last week. “I was just sitting back there and kind of chilling when A.P. came in. He was like, ‘Anybody sitting here?’ I told him there’s wasn’t, so he sat down. It allowed us to really get to know each other.

“Right away, there was a lot of communication. I got to learn a little bit more about his background, his past, his history. Then, he got a chance to know a little bit about me, about my aspirations. I had heard some amazing stuff about him. And I had seen how he worked last year. But from [the dinner], I learned his trajectory. And he learned about mine.”

Pierce was equally engaged, he remembered.

“I mean, it was the damnedest thing,” Pierce said last week. “We’re just talking and talking about everything. We’re talking about life. We’re talking about family. Then we start talking about business. We start talking about players. We talk about scheme and philosophies.

“What’s your vision? How do you see it? What would you do in this situation? How would you handle that? What do you think about this? It was, like, if we worked together, how would it be in all these different areas. Then three months later, yeah, we found out.”

Davis kicked off the NFL’s next hiring cycle by dumping McDaniels and Ziegler. Although the Raiders had struggled under them for two seasons (Las Vegas was 3-5 this season when McDaniels and Ziegler were ousted), Davis made the moves as much for what was occurring in the building during the week as on the field on game days. McDaniels’ rigidity in his belief that, well, he was always right, and his condescending treatment of Raiders players, NFL officials said, resulted in him losing the room in which a coach must succeed most: the locker room.

McDaniels helped the New England Patriots win six Super Bowl championships, but he has had two disastrous stints as a head coach with the Raiders and Denver Broncos. In Las Vegas, McDaniels failed to connect with players.

In that key area, Pierce, 45, has no such issues.

“Since I’ve been coaching, I’ve always had a great relationship with the players. It’s not just that I was a player. I also respect what they do ’cause it’s as hard as hell.” — Antonio Pierce

During his playing days with the Washington Redskins and the New York Giants, Pierce, a middle linebacker, was an outstanding teammate and leader of men, many former NFL players said. He went from being an undrafted rookie free agent to a Pro Bowl player who was a Giants team captain when they defeated the previously undefeated Patriots in Super Bowl XLII.

“Everything [players have] been through, I’ve pretty much been through,” Pierce said. “Now, I didn’t have to deal too much with social media, which came out toward the end of my career. But everything else they’ve dealt with on and off the field, I’ve dealt with, too. Since I’ve been coaching, I’ve always had a great relationship with the players. It’s not just that I was a player. I also respect what they do ’cause it’s as hard as hell.

“And it’s the most stressful job in all of sports because we have so few opportunities. So for me, it’s all about respect, which I let them know [the first time he addressed the team]. You know what I mean? We don’t have to like everybody, but we have to respect each other and respect what we do in this building every day. That’s the biggest thing for me with them. Same thing with the coaches. Just respect each other as men and work.”

Pierce was only in his second season as an NFL position coach when tapped by Davis to take command. Before joining the Raiders, Pierce was an ESPN analyst and spent five seasons coaching at Arizona State.

Since he replaced McDaniels, the Raiders are 3-3, and Pierce has received high marks internally for how players have responded to him. For Pierce, that’s good news in his bid to remain atop the Raiders’ coaching staff. Pierce’s lack of head coaching experience in college or the pros until this season, however, could prove to be a deterrent to Davis retaining Pierce in his current position.

Regardless of the brevity of his tenure as a head coach, Pierce believes his bona fides as a leader are beyond reproach.

“When you’re a captain on a team, you’re a leader on a team,” Pierce said. “As the ‘mike’ [middle linebacker], you make the calls. You make all the checks [pre-snap adjustments]. You get all your guys in the right spots. As a captain, you fix all the problems that they’ve got in the locker room. You break up fights between the coaches and players.

“And people don’t talk about what I’ve done since I stopped playing. I was on ESPN. I communicate. I’m a businessman. I’m an entrepreneur. I’ve never stopped leading. So when people say I lack experience as a leader, I struggle with that because being a leader means you lead in everything you do. And this is a people business. I’ve proven I know people.”

Kelly, 43, has proven a lot as well.

Kelly was the Chicago Bears’ assistant director of player personnel. He also was the Bears’ director of pro scouting. Kelly began his career as a scout with the Denver Broncos, rising to become the Broncos’ assistant director of pro personnel.

A wide receiver and defensive back at the University of Kentucky, Kelly earned both a bachelor’s degree in computer science and an MBA from the school. A whiz with numbers, he once worked in software for IBM, rising to software engineer. Kelly is as affable as he is analytical, league officials said.

In the Raiders’ previous search for a general manager, Kelly finished as the runner-up to Ziegler. Davis was so impressed by Kelly that he created the assistant general manager position in what proved to be a successful attempt to lure Kelly to the organization. There’s a growing belief in the league that the Raiders’ next general manager is already occupying the job.

That’s something for others to chew on, Kelly said. He has work to do.

“I firmly believe in how you do anything is how you do everything. So I live my life to maximize every opportunity that I get in every situation,” Kelly said. “I’m never gonna worry about what others are saying or the chatter that’s going on. That’s where anxiety lives at.

“I focus on today. I focus on trying to maximize that while also making sure that the Raiders’ future is taken care of. I’m strictly focused on executing my task at the highest level to lead this organization in a direction that’s gonna help us win championships.”

Like with most things, Kelly and Pierce are aligned in that thinking, too. An important discussion over dinner during the summer marked the beginning of their great relationship. And from the look of things, their new partnership could wind up uplifting the Raiders for a long time.