It’s the question more than few people covering the Raiders are asking right now…
NBC’s Mike Florio talked about it last week and Raider Nation Radio host Q Myers brought it up on Monday.
Who’s going to be calling the shots in Las Vegas now that the playoffs are a pipe dream and the offseason is less than two months away?
Minority owner Tom Brady has a huge role within the organization, but John Spytek is the GM and Pete Carroll is a head coach with a Super Bowl resume. On paper, Spytek is in charge of decisions on the football side of operations, but everyone has a boss and Spytek, no doubt, reports directly to Brady on big decisions.
But in any scenarios where Brady, Spytek and Carroll aren’t entirely on the same page (which, realistically, is going to happen a lot), who’s going to get their way?
That’s the question Myers asked this week on the Locked on Raiders Squad Show podcast.
“Who’s calling the shots?” Myers said of the Raiders and their most important organizational decisions going forward.
“Who’s evaluating everybody? Because if Chip Kelly is, say, Brady’s guy, and let’s just say Pete Carroll is Mark Davis’ guy. Alright, well, who’s call is it? And I’m just throwing this out there.”
“I’m not saying that that’s what it is, but just if that’s what it is, if there’s that kind of dynamic, who has bigger say? Does Pete Carroll and his shorter contract, where he’s only under contract for a couple more years and has a fourth-year team option, or is it, ‘Hey, Brady wants Chip Kelly, Chip Kelly is the highest paid offense coordinator, we’re going [go] with what this guy wants to do.’ It just, to me, my biggest complaint is, like I said earlier, the left hand and the right hand don’t seem to be on the same page,” Myers continued.
“What my vision of a Pete Carroll team is, is not what we see on Sundays or Thursdays or Monday or whatever the case may be. It just doesn’t seem like that they’re meshing correctly and I don’t know if they share the same vision. To me, that’s the biggest problem. That’s the first question that’s got to be answered.”
For what it’s worth, Sports Illustrated insider Hondo Carpenter talked about the power structure within the Raider organization before the start of the season, and he believed at the time that Spytek has final authority but often defers to Carroll.
“Ultimately, John Spytek, it’s his call. But he likes to do, at least he has up to this point, a very collaborative approach with Pete Carroll,” Carpenter said on the Las Vegas Raiders Insider podcast in September.
“John [Spytek] has not told me this and Pete [Carroll] has not told me this. But people within the organization have made it very clear to me that if John and Pete were to disagree, for the most part, John is going to go with Pete. That’s what people in the organization have said to me,” Carpenter continued.
“I think there are a few places on the roster you can look at, and several places maybe on the roster you can look at and say that that probably meshes with what I’ve been told… I know some organizations where the general manager does not give a rip what anybody thinks, but Pete likes to listen to all of his coaches, so does John, to John’s credit, take that information and assimilate it, then Pete and John hash it out and talk about how they want to do it.”
ProFootballTalk’s Mike Florio isn’t sure Carroll will be back in 2026.
Florio talked about some of the same rumblings as Myers last week, and he added a Chip Kelly element to the conversation.
“I just wonder how the coaching staff will change after this season. There has been some talk, and I don’t know what’s accurate or not, Tom Brady is not going to text me and tell me and I don’t have the keys to the inner sanctum. But if Chip Kelly is a Brady guy, and I don’t know, I don’t know how this all plays out after the season,” Florio said on PFT Live last week.
“Pete Carroll was one and done 31 years ago with the Jets. And we see one and done like when one and done happens, we’re like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe it.’ And then I pull up our story with all the one and done’s from the past 10 years [and] it’s like, ‘Hell, it happens a lot.’”
“I just don’t know where this is going for the Raiders, and I wonder what Tom Brady thinks…”
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It’s definitely showing that Pete is getting his way. Terrible old players that aren’t going to do nothing but take the money. It’s the same story now that it was towards the end of Al’s life. Mark should sell just not to Brady. Brady shouldn’t be running the organization because he doesn’t know what he’s doing. His QB is practice squad level. His GM should just be looking at practice squad level players as at best an Assistant GM. His OC isn’t NFL level. And on and on