When the offseason rolls around, the Raiders will be back at the ground floor in their search for a franchise quarterback, and for once, they should have a draft pick high enough to take one of the top quarterbacks in the draft.
For the last four years, the Raiders have drafted too low to get one of the consensus top quarterbacks, but it’s also true that this year they could have drafted Shedeur Sanders.
Sanders wasn’t drafted until the fifth round, and it was clear from the outside that Tom Brady and the decision makers in Las Vegas had no interest in adding Sanders to the roster.
One key figure in the organization that would have been on board with drafting Sanders, though, appears to be owner Mark Davis.
According to former head coach Antonio Pierce, the plan until he was fired by the organization in January, was to draft Shedeur.
“When I was with the Raiders, he 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.”
Sanders wasn’t great in his NFL debut, but he was better than Geno Smith and, most importantly, he got the win.
Even if the organization didn’t like Sanders in the early rounds of this year’s draft, to move forward without a viable backup for Smith was not a great decision.
Sanders might not be the long-term answer at quarterback in Cleveland, but they at least have a young quarterback to be enthusiastic about. The Raiders have Aidan O’Connell and Cam Miller, and neither are considered players with a lot of upside.
In all likelihood, Smith will be released by the Raiders in the offseason, and they will be prime candidates to take Fernando Mendoza from Indiana or Ty Simpson from Alabama in the 2026 draft.
This time, Brady, Spytek, Davis and whoever else is making personnel decisions in Las Vegas, desperately need to get the decision right.
A report on Monday indicated the Raiders had a third-round grade on Sanders at the time of Antonio Pierce’s departure
According to Sports Illustrated insider Hondo Carpenter, the Raiders like Sanders, but did not have a first-round grade on him when Pierce was in the building.
“The Raiders did not have him valued as a first rounder, but they very much did like him. And I believe that the Raiders would have pulled the trigger on Shedeur probably in the third round. That was in that area was where I had heard early in the process,” Carpenter said on the Las Vegas Raiders Insider podcast.
“That was the mindset of the [Tom] Telesco, Antonio Pierce regime after the season.”
x: @raidersbeat
We make the scrubs look like all pros. And Dave is saying he was on board with Sanders continues to show what an imbecile he is. But we all knew that when he tugged Brady. and his garbage GM.
Pretty soon, gonna run out of people to fire. And Davis is gonna have to look in the mirror. Something I know he doesn’t like doing.
Sanders is a joke, just shows how dumb Mark is.
Mark Davis and his Raiders. Fifteen years, and counting, of futility!