The Raiders are expected to take a quarterback some after the first round in this year’s draft, and Alabama QB Jalen Milroe is a player that could be a good fit behind veteran quarterback Geno Smith.
Smith just signed a two-year extension in Las Vegas, but the Raiders can get away from his contract easily in two years. And according to ProFootballTalk’s Mike Florio, the deal could be scrapped after one season with the only consequence being the dead money hit in 2026.
Milroe, per ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler, would “love” to go to the Raiders and develop behind Smith, who will turn 35 during the 2025 season.
“The Las Vegas Raiders, I know, are on Milroe’s radar because they have Geno Smith,” Fowler said on ESPN’s SportsCenter on Sunday. “[The Raiders] would be a team he would love to go to [and] slide behind Smith for a couple of years and learn.”
“He’s looking at this as sort of an early day two proposition, but he could sneak into the late first round if somebody loves him enough A lot of teams have done serious homework on him. He probably has the highest upside, if you can get around the accuracy issues,” Fowler continued.
“I’ve talked to his quarterback coach Jordan Palmer, he said they’ve been working for the last year on his fluidity, connection to the ground, which he believes will help him at the next level… So this is a guy where if you can stash him for a couple of years and play him. [Milroe has] high, high upside.”
For the Raiders part, there hasn’t been a lot reported on their level of interest in Milroe. We do know, however, that he has impressed a lot of teams in his interviews.
The Athletic’s Vic Tafur and Tashan Reed reported in March that there were two quarterbacks that particularly impressed the Raiders during interviews at the NFL Combine.
“According to league sources, the Raiders came away particularly impressed with [Jalen] Milroe and [Quinn] Ewers when going over X’s and O’s and film, though the No. 6 pick would be too rich of a slot to take either one,” Tafur and Reed wrote in March.
Sports Illustrated’s Hondo Carpenter is another Raiders insider who spoke glowingly about Milroe after the Combine.
“There were a lot of people that were pleasantly surprised at him. Very pleasantly surprised by him,” Carpenter said of Milroe on the Las Vegas Raiders Insider podcast in March. “His answers were tremendous. His knowledge was extremely impressive. I want to be careful how I word this next one. I think the change in coaching maybe hurt him a little bit with Alabama. I’ll just leave it there.”
“One of the teams asked Jalen Milroe a series of questions about what he was really good at,” Hondo continued. “And then they said they asked him what he could get better at, and his answer was, ‘How much time do you have?’ And the guy goes, we’re sitting there interviewing Jalen Milroe, and he’s telling us all the areas that he’s working on right now.”
“To which this team said to him, ‘Are you not concerned pointing out those things to us would concern us?’ He basically said to them, I wasn’t in the room, but basically said, ‘You should be concerned with any guy that comes in this room, who hasn’t played a down of NFL football and doesn’t tell you that he has weaknesses or that he isn’t working on them. Plus, it’s an insult because that means he doesn’t think you know how to watch film.’”
x: @raidersbeat
Round 2 pal hang tight.
No thanks!