Raiders Insider Shares What Tom Telesco Told Him about the Decision to Draft Brock Bowers in ’24

Fernando Mendoza and Brock Bowers are widely considered the two players the Raiders wouldn’t consider trading (maybe Ashton Jeanty, too), but it wasn’t long ago that former Raiders GM Tom Telesco took a lot of criticism for taking a tight end with the 13th overall pick.

Bowers ended up being one of the shrewdest picks of the first round in 2024, but it wasn’t enough to save Telesco’s job after the season.

After joining the Raiders’ ownership group in October of 2024, Tom Brady wanted his own people in the building and that development led to John Spytek replacing Telesco at the top of the team’s personnel department.

Since leaving the Raiders, Telesco has been open about some of the decisions he made during his Las Vegas tenure, and this week, the California Post’s Vinny Bonsignore shared details from a conversation he had with Telesco on the team’s decision to draft Bowers.

From Bonsignore on Raider Nation Radio’s Morning Tailgate…

“I remember having lunch, this was after Tom Telesco had gotten fired, he and I sat down, we have lunch and just talk about things and all that good stuff. And he had told me, he walked me through that draft night. And I had to explain to him, Adam Hill… his name came up because I told him that Adam felt like a tight end, you shouldn’t draft a tight end that high in the draft. I didn’t do that to throw Adam under the bus. I was just throwing out a differing opinion.”

And what Tom said that was so interesting to me is ‘I can’t argue with that.’ He goes, ‘In fact, that was the argument that we had on draft night and draft day’ and as the minutes started ticking away in terms of… having those discussions with his scouts and everyone that’s in that room, there was a differing of opinions, There often is. Especially when it comes to something like this.

But Tom Telesco said, ultimately, the talent was just too good, and it was a difficult decision, but they made the right decision. And the reason that I bring that up… is that when the Raiders went into this off season, this past off season, and we’re calling it the semester, the recently concluded semester, they had two players on the roster already offensively, dynamic players in my estimation. I don’t think anyone would necessarily disagree with that in Brock Bowers and Ashton Jeanty, a tight end and a running back.

And if you go back to those two drafts, there was criticism of the Raiders for drafting a tight end as high as they did Brock Bowers and a running back as high as they did in Ashton Jeanty. But when you fast forward to the draft that just happened, even though those were maybe controversial or criticized decisions at the time, aren’t you glad that those players were in place when this draft came about? Because you’ve got two dynamic players on your roster and it is all about talent and drafting the highest-level player that you possibly can and just keep stacking it together…”

Telesco liked Jaxson Dart in the 2025 Draft?

Given that it sounds like Telesco confided a little in Bonsignore, a comment Bonsignore made in November carries some more weight.

“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.”

Before Dart, Telesco admitted he wanted Jayden Daniels and Bo Nix

A year ago, Telesco talked about who he was targeting with the 13th pick in 2024 and who the Raiders would have liked to trade up and get at the time…

“We preferred to take a premium position in the first round of the draft and on the pay scale, tight ends don’t fit in that group. [Drafting Brock Bowers] was something he had kind of pushed to the side even though we knew how good he was,” Telesco said on the Check the Mic podcast in June of last year.

“[But] as we got later in the process, the way I looked at it, what he could bring to our offense, what he could do, I kind of went off the script a little bit and decided to go that route and I’m glad we did. He’s an outstanding player.”

Safe to say, the thinking in the Raiders’ building changed significantly because they turned down a solid trade offer (or two) for the opportunity to draft Bowers.

In the same conversation around Bowers, Telesco also acknowledged that Jayden Daniels was the quarterback the Raiders really wanted in 2024.

“That would have been easy,” Telesco said. “But then when we got into J.J. McCarthy, Bo Nix and Michael Penix, as far as trading up for those guys, that I was not as much into. To give up that many assets, because we were going to have to give up a lot of draft picks. We needed as many as possible to try to build up the team. So that would have been a hard move to make to trade up for one of those quarterbacks… other than Jayden Daniels that was going to be a non-starter.

Telesco pointed to injury concerns around Penix as a concern but added that drafting Nix was in consideration.

“Bo Nix, his background of work, his durability, his movement skills. That one was interesting, and he’s gone to the perfect team. That would have been a good possibility.”

x: @raidersbeat