Going into the 2024 season, there might not have been a player on the Raiders more in line for a breakout season that fourth-year edge rusher Malcolm Koonce.
Koonce was coming away from a huge second half of the 2023 season and defensive coordinator Patrick Graham named Koonce as the player on the roster he thought would make biggest stride forward in 2024.
“I don’t want to put anybody on the spot, but I just love what Malcolm [Koonce] has been able to do,” Graham said in August of last year.
“In terms of what he was able to do last year and the way he’s working right now. I think he could care less what happened last year. He’s just like Maxx, you have to do every week, every year, it’s a new season,” Graham continued. “The way he’s been working, the maturity in terms of him growing into himself as an NFL player and knowing who he is and being able to communicate that and execute it. It should be fun to watch. I’m not going to predict this and that. I just know this. Show me you’re doing the work. We’ll see what the results are. Let’s rock. He’s putting in that work.”
But the 2024 season didn’t go according to plan for Koonce, and a knee injury ended the 25-year-old’s season just days before the season opener.
In March, Koonce entered free agency after missing all of the 2024 season and eventually signed a one year, $11.04 million deal with the Raiders.
It was rumored that Koonce was going to be difficult for the Raiders to keep, but based on his comments to Crosby, Koonce was always planning to return to the team that drafted him.
“The draft is stressful because you don’t know where you’re going. Free agency is like your mini-draft that nobody knows what’s going on but you, your agent, and maybe your family and stuff like that,” Koonce told Crosby on The Rush.
“I knew I wanted to come back [to the Raiders]. I knew I wanted to play with you guys again. So my agent would be like ‘These people are interested’ and I’d be like ‘Well, what did the Raiders say?’ He’d say ‘These people are offering this’ and I’d be like ‘Have you checked with the Raiders in the last couple of days?'”
Koonce talked about the challenge of coming back from last year’s knee injury and Crosby described what it was like for the locker room to see Koonce get injured right before the start of the season.
“Just the raw emotion of how it kind of went down… [Malcolm] is coming off the best season you’ve had to that point… you were having an incredible offseason, incredible training camp… and this was like right before we go and play the Chargers, last padded practice a couple day before the game and we were on the indoor, [Malcolm] takes one step and tears his ACL,” Crosby said, adding that defensive line coach Rob Leonard was visibly shaken by the injury.
“It happened so fast we were like ‘What the f— just happened? He goes down on the field and… just from my perspective, our standpoint seeing that, I’ve never seen a group of guys, and you know our d-line, we’re so close. We were all f—ed up. [Robbie [Leonard] is probably going to get mad I said this. Robbie was f—ing in tears. We were all f—ed up from it.”
By all accounts, Koonce is expected to be at full strength going into the 2025 season and he is once again entering a contract year with an opportunity to make big money in the offseason.
After the massive contracts Maxx Crosby and Myles Garrett signed a few months ago, Koonce should have every motivation to achieve the breakout season in 2025 that he was expecting in 2024.
x: @raidersbeat