Raiders defensive end Maxx Crosby says four quarterbacks stand out as the hardest in the NFL to sack.
Asked in a kick.com interview who he considers the hardest to sack in the league, Crosby named Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson, Bills quarterback Josh Allen and Buccaneers quarterback Baker Mayfield.
“Mahomes has definitely got to be up there, Lamar is a freak athlete, he’s so quick and fast. Josh Allen is like my size playing quarterback, but you’ve got to really fucking tackle him. I’d say those three are the top,” Crosby said. “A sleeper one, too: Baker Mayfield. He pissed me off. I had two of them I should have had on him. He ducked under, got under them. I was fucking livid. Baker’s tough. I like Baker.”
Crosby never sacked Mayfield in that game (the photo accompanying this post shows one of the near-sacks that Mayfield escaped), and Mayfield threw for three touchdown passes in a 28-13 Buccaneers win. Crosby hasn’t forgotten.
Despite plenty of struggles since last winning the Super Bowl more than four years before Kirk Cousins was born, the Raiders have earned the first overall pick in the draft only twice: in 2007 and in 2026.
How did it go the last time? Not too good.
JaMarcus Russell didn’t start right away. It probably wouldn’t have mattered if he had. After 25 starts in three seasons, it was over for him.
Now, Fernando Mendoza enters the fray with the hope of becoming the first true year-to-year franchise quarterback the Raiders have had since Kenny Stabler. And the options for Week 1 are Mendoza and Cousins.
In late March, new coach Klint Kubiak made it clear that he’d prefer to have Mendoza “watching a mature adult go and run an offense and run the team.” But Cousins has acknowledged that the decision should be driven by merit.
“I honestly don’t want to start unless I’m the best option, and I told Klint that,” Cousins said in early April. “The best player should play. As long as that’s the case, I have no qualms about however it plays out.”
So how will it play out? Kubiak talked up Cousins during the offseason program, which could be another clue as to Kubiak’s preference. But training camp is a different beast.
When practice begins, and when both quarterbacks are getting chances to do what they do, the players will have a chance to witness their performances. To compare and to contrast them. And, ultimately, to develop an impression as to which guy provides the better option to win games.
If it’s Mendoza, it won’t be easy to bench him for Cousins. The other players (starting with Maxx Crosby) will want to win. If the players think Mendoza puts them in a better position to do that, they won’t be thrilled with a long-term plan to get more out of Mendoza later by having him do less now.
The Chiefs pulled that off with Patrick Mahomes nine years ago because the Chiefs were a perennial playoff team under Alex Smith. The Raiders are a perennial also-ran, running behind the other teams in the AFC West. If the locker room thinks Mendoza is, to use Cousins’s term, “the best player,” the locker room won’t be thrilled with the idea of keeping Fernando parked in the garage like a Ferrari, opting instead to tool around in a Fiat.
And if the 37-year-old Cousins, who had no immediate market for his services as a clear-cut QB1 elsewhere, outperforms Mendoza, what does that say about the Raiders’ decision to make Mendoza the first overall pick in the draft?
The days of the five-year plan in the NFL ended closer to five decades than five years ago. Life in the NFL happens one season at a time. Veteran players don’t want a year in which players less than the best available at all positions aren’t playing.
Put simply, the Raiders haven’t been good enough to put the better player on the bench. If that’s Mendoza, he needs to play. If it’s not Mendoza, maybe they should have picked a better player when they returned to the JaMarcus Russell spot for the first time in 19 years.
Raiders defensive end Maxx Crosby says the NFL needs to let players wear whatever color shoes they want.
Asked in a kick.com interview if he could be commissioner and change one thing, Crosby answered, “The shoe game.”
Crosby detailed how in a game with the Eagles last season, he wore pink shoes with roses on them as a tribute to his daughter, but the NFL made him take them off, during the game.
“The NBA does it right. They let the players do their own shit, rock their own colors,” Crosby said. “In the NFL you can’t wear any color that’s off the jersey, which is low-key lame. I wore pink cleats in Philly this year, I wore them for about two, three drives. They were on the sideline, my equipment guy was looking at me with a pair of my other cleats like, ‘You’ve got to come and take those cleats off because they’re bitching about it.’ I’m like, ‘Fuck that, I’m playing the rest of the series.’ It was third down in the red zone, I got a sack in those pink cleats, and then I had to take them off and I could never wear them again.”
Crosby noted that the NFL encourages players to express themselves on their shoes with the annual My Cause, My Cleats campaign, and he sees no reason players can’t pick their own shoes for every game.
“NFL should just let us wear our own colors on our shoes. It’s not that hard. We ain’t hurting anybody,” Crosby said. “We do it every year with My Cause, My Cleats. That’s the only time we get to wear different colored cleats. That’s one game, or two games.”
Crosby’s message to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is clear.
“I love the NFL, but we’ve got to have a little more fun, Roger.”
Yes, it will be interesting to have Jon Gruden back in a broadcast booth. Assuming he’s not the same Jon Gruden who was trying not to burn bridges during the eight years he spent at ESPN.
Unfiltered Gruden is the best Gruden. And he left the filter home when recently discussing the state of the game with Cam Heyward.
“I’m worried about the game to be honest with you,” Gruden said regarding the state of quarterback play, via Nate Brinkerhoff of USA Today. “A lot of people think the game is evolving. I think the game is dissolving.”
Gruden blames it on communication, or lack thereof.
“We’re just not communicating,” Gruden said. “I always use these three letters ‘RCE.’ You got to recognize the defense, recognize the coverage, and then you start to communicate. You can change the play, you can stay with the play, but you got to be a great communicator. And if you can recognize defenses, communicate what you want to do, you got a chance to execute.”
That process requires time to read the defense and react accordingly.
“When you just run up to the line of scrimmage, clap your hands, and hope for the best,” Gruden said. “I can’t take all these RPO bubble screens and high turbo tempo offenses with six false starts a game and no communication. . . . I’d rather slam my hand in a car door than watch some of this.”
As Gruden sees it, the problem isn’t at the professional level. It’s at the college level.
“A lot of these guys are on four or five different colleges,” Gruden said. “I mean they transfer from one college to another. There’s no continuity and you know repetition is the mother of learning. You had to get into the same stance, do the same drills and the same defense for a period of years. And that’s how you master the techniques.”
And while Gruden’s immediate aspiration is to call games as the play-by-play announcer, he continues to keep the door open to coaching.
“I would love to get into a locker room and start putting together some game plans again,” Gruden said. “I miss it, man. But, we’ll take one day at a time and all you can do is prepare yourself for somebody to toss you the chalk and interview you. . . . I’ll be ready if somebody does.”
While waiting for someone to toss him the chalk, Gruden will be possibly throwing a headset while broadcasting a game featuring some of the bad habits that will bring out his inner Chucky.
Who usually doesn’t lurk very far below the surface.
Jon Gruden wants to work play-by-play on an NFL broadcast. And he will.
Appearing on WDAE in Tampa, Ira Kaufman said Gruden will handle play-by-play duties for an NFL preseason game “in about a month.”
Kaufman offered no further details as to the date, the teams, or whether it’ll be a full game or part of a game.
“I want to be play-by-play,” Gruden recently said on The Ira Kaufman Podcast. “You know, Frank Gifford, he transitioned into the play-by-play role. I would like to transition. I had nine years of watching these guys — [Mike] Tirico. And I’d like to give that a shot, man.”
The assignment comes at a time when Gruden has active civil litigation against the NFL and Commissioner Roger Goodell over the events that led to Gruden’s forced resignation from the Raiders during the 2021 season. Emails Gruden had sent and received while working for ESPN had made their way into thousands of documents collected during the first investigation of the Washington franchise.
Someone leaked those emails, which contained various forms of problematic content, to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. After the first leak, Gruden did not resign. After the second, he did.
