According to Antonio Pierce on Sunday, if he was still head coach of the Raiders, Shedeur Sanders would not have fallen to the fifth round of the draft.
“When I was with the Raiders, [Shedeur] was one of our top choices,” Pierce said of Sanders on CBS Sports’ NFL Today.
“If I would have stayed there, there’s no way he goes in the fifth round. I’m making that choice and decision that we’re drafting him. Mark Davis was on board with that. Our organization was on board. We believed in what we saw in Shedeur.”
As it turns out, though, Pierce may have gotten some pushback on Sanders if that’s the direction he wanted to go. According to the Las Vegas Review Journal’s Vinny Bonsignore, former GM Tom Telesco had his eye on a quarterback at the top of the draft last year and his name wasn’t Shedeur.
“I think that’s who [Pierce] preferred and had he still been the coach he would have fought for Shedeur Sanders,” Bonsignore said on Raider Nation Radio’s Morning Tailgate.
“It makes a lot of sense when we talk about all the connections that Shedeur had to the Raiders. I just think that if he and Tom Telesco had still been here, I think the General Manager would have been pounding the table for somebody else and that would have been Jaxson Dart.”
A day earlier on the show, Bonsignore shared more details on the dynamic between Telesco and Dart.
It’s sounds like Telesco really liked Dart.
“The former general manager loved Jaxson Dart to the point where he literally went to, I don’t know if I’ve said this publicly or on air, but Tom Telesco bought a ticket. Bought a ticket. He didn’t go, usually general managers go to college games and sit in the booth, but he didn’t want anybody to know that he was there,” Bonsignore said on the Morning Tailgate on Monday.
“It was the Gator Bowl, I believe,” Bonsignore continued. “Whatever bowl game Ole Miss was in, he goes, I bought a ticket, sat in the stands to watch him one more time play live. That was who the Raiders really liked.”
“Now, it was, you never know how a draft’s going to play out, and it’s still January. They both got fired in January, so a lot can happen in the draft. So what I’ll say is, I think the first preference would have been Jaxson Dart somewhere along the line, maybe not with the sixth pick, but somewhere along the line. And if they didn’t get Jaxson Dart somehow, someway, I do think Shedeur Sanders would have been a Raider. I don’t think the Raiders would have passed on him…. So I do agree with Antonio on that part.”
We’ll never know what would have happened if Telesco and Pierce had been in charge of the 2025 draft in Las Vegas, but it’s interesting to know what could have been.
Many believe Tom Brady is the decision maker in the Raiders’ building when it comes to the quarterback room and Brady’s first year in the building netted the team Geno Smith and Cam Miller, with a third-round pick sent to Seattle in the process.
The Geno experiment hasn’t been a success, or anything remotely close, but let’s see what Brady has in store for the team this offseason.
Both Ty Simpson and/or Fernando Mendoza seem like reasonable consolation prizes… and after listening to Mendoza speak last week, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where Brady doesn’t like him a lot.
Only five months to the draft, Raider fans!
Don’t think we can beat the titans to #1 but would they trade with us?
Sanders will never be a successful starter. Great ago Telesco wanted CJ Stroud. The stories grow taller down the line.
This team drafts so dumb, that they’ll bring back Bernie Kozar and draft a bad fat lineman at No. 1
All the more reason to be glad AP wasn’t given the job. An inexperienced head coach that tries to influence the draft based on terrible player evaluation is not really a great formula for success. But hey, the players liked him.