The 2024 NFL draft is officially in the books.
Now let’s look at a handful of rumors and reports around the Raiders in the days following the draft…
The Jets were willing to trade down with the Raiders or Saints prior to drafting Penn State offensive tackle Olumuyiwa Fashanu.
In the video below, released by the Jets media team, New York GM Joe Douglas implies that he would be willing to trade down to pick 13 or 14 if the Raiders or Saints “would be about it.”
In both cases, the teams apparently were not about it.
There were teams targeting Jackson Powers-Johnson in the first round.
According to Sports Illustrated insider Hondo Carpenter, there were teams hoping to get Powers-Johnson in the first round, but players with higher first-round grades were available and pushed the Oregon interior lineman into the second round.
“I know teams that absolutely wanted Jackson Powers-Johnson and were going to take him in the first round,” Carpenter said on the Las Vegas Raiders Insider podcast. “But like the Raiders with [Brock] Bowers, he just kept getting pushed down so they got somebody that they didn’t think they would get, and the Raiders to nab him in the second round was, to me, I believe is going to be one of the steals of the draft.”
Of course, every team wants to send the message that they couldn’t believe the player(s) that fell to them, but in the case of the Raiders, nearly every mainstream mock draft had Bowers and Powers-Johnson being drafted higher than where the Raiders picked them.
Most teams had Brock Bowers as the no. 5 or no. 6 overall prospect on their draft boards.
The run on quarterbacks in the first round might not have pushed anyone down in the draft more than Bowers.
According to NFL insider Tony Pauline, Bowers was nearly a consensus top 10 prospect with most teams having him near the top of their draft board.
“Many thought the Raiders would regroup and pick Taliese Fuaga of Oregon State, but the team selected tight end Brock Bowers. They received great value selecting the playmaking Bowers, who was graded as the fifth or sixth overall player on most boards around the league,” Pauline reported this week in his AFC draft grade column.
What would be fun to know now is how high the Raiders had him on their board.
Would the Raiders have taken Oregon quarterback Bo Nix if the Broncos hadn’t drafted him at pick 12?
This seems like a stretch, but league insider Benjamin Allbright, who has been a guest on Raider Nation Radio many times, believes the Raiders would have drafted Nix if the Broncos didn’t…
Since taking Nix with the 12th-overall pick, the Broncos have been on a public relations tour to defend the selection of Nix, and it will be interesting to see if rumors that the Raiders liked Nix are confirmed or denied by anyone around the team.
The popular opinion is that if Brock Bowers hadn’t been available at pick 13, the Raiders would have taken Oregon State offensive tackle Taliese Fuaga.
Also, if the Raiders really liked Nix, wouldn’t they have had more interest in the Jets pick at no. 11 to jump ahead of the Broncos?
Is Gardner Minshew the penciled-in starting quarterback for the Raiders as of now?
It sure seemed that way from Ian Rapoport’s tweet on Thursday.
And did Rapoport confirm, indirectly, that the Raiders had a first-round grade on Nix?
twitter: @raidersbeat