The Raiders selected quarterback Fernando Mendoza at No. 1 overall last month.
But Las Vegas also has Kirk Cousins, who is — at this point — expected to begin the season as the club’s QB1.
As a veteran quarterback who’s familiar with the offensive system, Cousins is showing command at the position, with the Raiders getting their OTAs started this week.
“Yeah, he’s a professional. He’s played a lot of football. He’s a leader that we’re counting on right now,” Kubiak told reporters on Wednesday. “You see that side of him when it gets competitive, that was fun to get that move the ball period and get guys off of scripts and see how they respond, and you see the fire come out, and that’s what I want from our guys.”
Given that it’s still May, Kubiak has not yet officially named a starting quarterback. But he noted that the players will be the ones to really make that decision.
“It’s going to reveal itself, especially in training camp,” Kubiak said. “But it’s going to reveal itself here in these next how many do we have? Eight OTAs, these minicamp practices. But yeah, we definitely would [like to name a QB], but [we’ll] let the players figure that out for us with their tape.”
With Atlanta last season, Cousins completed 61.7 percent of his passes for 1,721 yards with 10 touchdowns and five interceptions.
Raiders Clips
Raiders running back Ashton Jeanty came into the league with high expectations last season, but he didn’t quite reach them during a dismal year in Las Vegas.
Jeanty averaged 3.7 yards per carry and only had four games when he picked up more than 100 yards from scrimmage. Some of the blame for his struggles could be attributed to an offensive line that didn’t offer many holes and poor quarterback play that did little to open up the field, but there’s not much to do to dress up what was a disappointing rookie campaign.
On Wednesday, Jeanty discussed his hope for better results in Year 2 and said that drilling down on what he’s seeing on the field has helped him feel more prepared for what’s coming his way in Year 2.
“Just focusing in more on the details, what the defense is doing, how we’re blocking things, coverage, all that type of stuff,” Jeanty said, via the team’s website. “So, it’s definitely slowing down, and I think it’s also just repetition as well. The more you rep it, the more the game slows down.”
The Raiders hope that they’ve solved some of the other issues that made them the lowest-scoring team in the league last year and a jump forward for Jeanty would be a welcome jolt as well.
The Raiders drafted Fernando Mendoza to be their quarterback of the future. The No. 1 overall pick has been “as advertised” thus far, coach Klint Kubiak said Wednesday.
"[He has] not disappointed,” Kubiak said, via Ryan McFadden of ESPN. “He’s working his tail off. It’s very important to him that he asks a lot of great questions when he gets on the field. He’s no B.S.; he’s all ball.”
The Raiders are easing Mendoza into the offense, with Kirk Cousins taking first-team reps, followed by Aidan O’Connell and then Mendoza.
Kubiak has repeatedly said he would prefer that a rookie quarterback not start Day 1, and the sportsbooks like Cousins to start Week 1. But the Raiders are giving Mendoza every chance to win the job.
Mendoza is going the extra mile, putting in the work, asking questions and taking notes.
“Anything that you put in front of him, he’s going to attack it,” Kubiak said. “Anything new, he spends extra time on. You can tell he fixes things from one day to the next.”
Defensive end Maxx Crosby’s unexpected return to the Raiders has not included a return to the practice field yet.
Crosby remains out after having knee surgery this offseason, but he was on the field to stretch with his teammates ahead of Wednesday’s organized team activity. Crosby may not do much more than that this spring as head coach Klint Kubiak said that the focus remains on making sure that he’s ready to go when training camp opens in August.
“Yeah, we do. That’s the goal,” Kubiak said. “He’s still the first one in this building every day, working. He’s a leader on our team, and when he’s out there, you feel his presence. And yes, we’re counting on him being there for training camp, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Maxx was ahead of schedule.”
Crosby was set to join the Ravens in March, but Baltimore called off the trade and Crosby returned to the Raiders after a 2025 season that featured some acrimony with the organization. Kubiak said that Crosby’s approach to the offseason has shown he “knows we’re counting on him to be a leader” before and after he’s healthy enough for a full return to action.
Raiders head coach Klint Kubiak hasn’t been in his job long, but he’s been in it long enough to know who one of the cornerstones of his team will be this season.
Tight end Brock Bowers had 112 catches for 1,194 yards and five touchdowns as a rookie, but an early-season knee injury forced him to play at less than 100 percent and miss time during his second year. The 2024 first-round pick had 64 catches for 680 yards and seven touchdowns in 12 games, but it doesn’t sound like any of the knee issues have been troubling Bowers this offseason.
Kubiak called Bowers a “standard bearer” for the organization and had a colorful description of what’s impressed him most about Bowers on the field.
“He’s kind of a football robot, in a good way,” Kubiak said at a Wednesday press conference. “He’s a football robot from heaven. You know, he’s a Cadillac out there. We gotta get the most out of Brock. Wherever he goes, he’s been successful.”
The Raiders have followed up the Bowers selection by taking running back Ashton Jeanty and quarterback Fernando Mendoza in the first round of the last two drafts. If all goes as hoped in Vegas, the trio will be the centerpiece of a lot of winning during the Kubiak era.
Raiders owner Mark Davis continues to own less and less of the team.
Via Albert Breer of SI.com, this week’s ownership meeting will include votes on several Raiders-related transactions.
Egon Durban hopes to buy another 11 percent of the team, which would push his personal holdings to 22 percent. Michael Meldman targets another 5.4 percent, for a total of 12.9 percent.
“Small chunks” of the team also will be purchased by Dell founder Michael Dell, Blackstone executive Joseph Baratta, WME Group Executive Chairman Ari Emanuel, and TKO president Mark Shapiro.
Earlier this year, Davis created a succession plan that would give Durban an option to buy controlling interest in the team, if/when Davis decides to cash out entirely.
For now, Davis is cashing out partially. He still has enough to run the team. It’s starting to feel like Davis is inching toward exiting the business he inherited when his father, Al Davis, died in 2011.
As Davis, who turned 72 on Monday, said earlier this year, he’s not married. He has no children. He can’t take it with him, and he can’t pass it on. Why not turn it into a mountain of cash while he’s still young enough to properly spend it?
When the Raiders signed Kirk Cousins as a free agent, they added a veteran quarterback with experience playing for head coach Klint Kubiak and offensive coordinator Andrew Janocko from their time in Minnesota.
Fernando Mendoza does not share that background. The first overall pick has been getting to know the offense over the course of the offseason and Janocko said that the fresh eyes have been beneficial to all involved. Janocko called Mendoza “a sponge” who “wants to know the whys of everything, the story behind everything” that the team is doing.
“He’s asking questions that you might not have thought about in a couple of years,” Janocko said, via the team’s website. “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.’”
It remains to be seen if Cousins or Mendoza is on the field against the Dolphins in Week 1, but Mendoza is the long-term answer for the franchise and anything he does now to create a fit for himself in the offense will pay dividends for the Raiders whenever he’s under center.
The Texans will have joint practices with two teams this summer.
Their joint practice with the Panthers before the final preseason game on Aug. 28 was previously reported on Monday. The Texans also will hold a joint practice with the Raiders ahead of the Aug. 20 preseason game in Houston, Jonathan Alexander of the Houston Chronicle reports.
New Raiders coach Klint Kubiak is the son of Gary Kubiak, who was the Texans’ head coach from 2006-13.
It will give Raiders quarterbacks Kirk Cousins and Fernando Mendoza a chance to take snaps against one of the league’s top defenses.
Former NFL defensive end Josh Mauro died last month at 35. Via the California Post, authorities have determined that Mauro’s death occurred as a result of an accidental drug overdose.
Officially, the cause of death was “acute combined fentanyl, cocaine, and ethanol intoxication.”
Mauro, who played college football at Stanford from 2010 through 2013, went undrafted in 2014. After four years with the Cardinals, Mauro spent one with the Giants and one with the Raiders. He returned to Arizona for the final two season of his career, in 2020 and 2021.
He appeared in 80 career regular-season games, with 40 starts.
Though they drafted quarterback Fernando Mendoza at No. 1 overall in April, the Raiders are one of five teams without a scheduled primetime game in 2026.
That’s not something new from the NFL, as the Titans didn’t have a primetime game in 2025 either after selecting quarterback Cam Ward with the first overall pick.
While the Raiders are a storied team with a nationally recognized brand, the fact that the team has won just seven games over the last two seasons is surely factoring into how attractive — or, in this case, unattractive — the club is for games in a standalone window.
In a conference call on Friday, NFL VP of broadcasting planning Mike North was asked whether or not the uncertainty of Mendoza being Las Vegas’ starting quarterback factored into the decision to keep the Raiders out of a primetime slot.
“As far as the Raiders go, I mean, nobody knows if or when Mendoza might play,” North said, via Ryan McFadden of ESPN. “It would certainly be great if we knew. We don’t. But they went out and signed a very competent veteran quarterback, and if they find themselves, you know, hovering around .500 and playoff-relevant in the middle of the season, they might be a little more reluctant to pull the trigger and move to the rookie. And if they are playoff-relevant, they will find themselves flexed into bigger national television windows, whether it’s Sunday night, Monday night, or just a bigger footprint on a Sunday afternoon.
“Not to point fingers, but I think the best comp is probably Tennessee from last year. They drafted No. 1 overall, took a quarterback who looks like he can play in this league, [and] they didn’t happen to get a national television appearance last year, either. … We don’t draft our way into primetime. We play our way into primetime.”
While head coach Klint Kubiak and the rest of the Raiders’ brass have said that they’d prefer to have a veteran start over a rookie quarterback early, Mendoza could be in the starting lineup sooner than later over veteran Kirk Cousins. We’ll see how Las Vegas’ quarterback situation plays out and whether or not the club can play its way into a flexed primetime spot as the season unfolds.
