The Raiders added one of the most respected offensive minds in football when they hired Klint Kubiak in February, but it sounds like the coaching upgrades on the offensive side of the ball didn’t end with Kubiak.
Mike Sullivan is Kubiak’s quarterbacks coach in Las Vegas and Sullivan got a huge endorsement this week from one of his former players.
On the Home Grown with David & Derek Carr, David Carr was asked about some of the hardest working coaches he has ever been around, and Carr named Sullivan from their time together with the New York Giants.
“That dude, you talk about having answers to the test, he will spend countless hours and days finding obscure coverages and fronts that these guys played against a certain formation that you have to where when you go on the field, you had all the answers. [He was] never surprised. He was uncanny about that,” Carr said of the Raiders’ 59-year-old quarterbacks coach.
Sullivan has coached in the NFL for 22 years, has been a quarterbacks coach for seven seasons, and been an offensive coordinator for four seasons. He also has nine years of experience as a college coach.
Kubiak wasn’t initially going to have a quarterbacks coach (they waited until March to hire Sullivan), but Sullivan’s familiarity with Kubiak ended up bringing the two together in Las Vegas.
No doubt, the addition of Fernando Mendoza was part of the draw for Sullivan, and after just a few weeks with the team, Mendoza seems to already be stretching the coaching staff.
Offensive coordinator Andrew Janocko talked about Mendoza this week and shared a rare compliment for any coordinator to offer, but particularly considering he was talking about a rookie quarterback.
“He’s asking questions that you might not have thought about in a couple of years,” Janocko said. “It also makes you evaluate everything. ‘I know we’ve had some success doing it one way, but we could do it another way and be even better.”
“He’s somebody that wants to know the whys of everything, the story behind everything. What we’re calling, but why are we calling it? He’s really just a sponge that wants to know everything. So it’s a lot of fun working with a quarterback like that because he’s coming in as a blank slate in this offense… never been in this offense before… and just asking a ton of questions.”
x: @raidersbeat