For reasons that have never been fully explained, the Raiders steered away from playing rookies in 2025, and for that reason there are still a lot of unknowns around last year’s draft class.
Was Pete Carroll at odds with his GM, or is there another explanation for why Jack Bech, Charles Grant and Caleb Rogers were used so sparingly a year ago?
It’s no secret that the coaching staff was not on the same page last year and that dynamic led to offensive coordinator Chip Kelly being fired after 11 games. And according to Sports Illustrated insider Hondo Carpenter, Kelly was one of the lead voices in the building to play veterans over the rookies.
“I’m going to tell you this. I know for a fact the administration and the team wholeheartedly believed in the two offensive linemen that they drafted [last year]. And I know the NFL did, as well,” Carpenter said on the Las Vegas Raiders Insider podcast.
“When Pete says he wishes they had addressed it, I think he meant was some higher placed draft picks. And, but I also can tell you there was an offensive coordinator who was looking to make a point of, I am the highest paid for a reason, and let’s stick with as many veterans as we can.”
Ultimately, the head coach is responsible for his assistants and one of the curious details that was brought up toward the end of the season was the notion that Carroll and Kelly barely talked during the season.
“I heard grumblings that Chip Kelly and Pete Carroll didn’t talk in the facility, which is unheard of,” Lincoln Kennedy said on the Locked on Raiders Squad Show podcast in December.
One person Kelly reportedly did consult with during the season was minority owner Tom Brady. In September, the NFL’s own X account reported that Brady and Kelly worked together on gameplans, but the tweet was deleted within an hour.
Raiders insider Vinny Bonsignore talked about the report later in the week and he believed the source of the report was Kelly himself.
“I guess it’s debatable how much input [Brady] actually has, and it’s something to keep an eye on,” Bonsignore said on Raider Nation Radio’s Morning Tailgate the day after the game.
“I’m sure we’ll be asking Pete that question again this week, and certainly Chip Kelly, because it sounded like, and this is some paraphrasing, because… it sounded like it came from Chip [Kelly], right? It sounded like based on what was talked about on ESPN, that Chip said, ‘Hey, we talked three times, you know, we talked multiple times a week and break down films.”
Looking ahead, it will be interesting to see how involved Brady is with Klint Kubiak’s offense.
Unlike Kelly, Kubiak is an accomplished offensive coordinator at the NFL level and there’s no doubt he wanted to clarify Brady’s role before he took the job in Las Vegas.
Considering he was being paid $18 million over three years, there’s a chance Kelly didn’t care how involved Brady wanted to be as long as the checks were clearing in his bank account.
x: @raidersbeat