Las Vegas Raiders coach Klint Kubiak is ready to put his personal emotions behind when he takes on his brother Klay in a 5 p.m. game at Allegiant Stadium.
Even for a preseason game.
“I love him,” Kubiak said earlier this week. “But I’m not going to love him on Thursday night.”
Klay Kubiak is the offensive coordinator of the San Francisco 49ers, the Raiders’ opponent for the last of three preseason contests.
They will meet again in the regular season on Nov. 8 in Santa Clara, but it won’t compare to last year when they were opposing offensive coordinators for the division rival 49ers and Seahawks.
After splitting a pair of regular-season matchups, Klint got the last laugh when his Seattle team trounced San Francisco 41-6 in the playoffs and went on to win the Super Bowl.
Still, Klint has high praise for his little brother.
“My brother is the smartest guy in the family, and I’m not kidding,” Klint Kubiak said. “He’s brilliant, works really hard.”
Klint Kubiak got to see it first hand when they were both on the 49ers staff in 2023.
Both were candidates for head coaching jobs this past offseason and both even interviewed for the Raiders’ opening that eventually was filled by Klint.
‘That’s kind of a blur. It feels like so long ago,” Klint Kubiak said of both being up for some of the same jobs. “That process was so easy for me because I didn’t have to think about it because we were playing games. We were game-planning in the playoffs.”
Now he is preparing for his first season as a head coach.
Neither coach is likely to do a whole lot of game-planning with a regular season meeting down the road and most starters taking Thursday night off.
But it is another notable moment for the Kubiak family with their father, Gary, a longtime NFL head coach likely to be in attendance at Allegiant Stadium.
The youngest Kubiak brother, Klein, is a scout with the Dallas Cowboys.
Contact Adam Hill at ahill@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AdamHillLVRJ on X.
