The Raiders have not seen much reward from the drafts overseen by former head coach Jon Gruden and General Manager Mike Mayock and the new regime in Vegas has not shown much interest in seeing if any of the players picked up in the last few years can turn things around.
They’ve traded or cut some high picks from the Gruden/Mayock era and they declined fifth-year options on all three players the team picked in the first round of the 2019 draft. Edge Clelin Ferrell was the fourth overall pick that year and his first three years have not seen the kind of production one usually associates with that draft position.
Ferrell is being asked to do some new things this year like play from a two-point stance in defensive coordinator Patrick Graham’s scheme and he has a spot in the rotation to use in a bid to show the Raiders that he’s capable of more than he’s shown to this point.
“You got to focus on what you can control . . . I come from a program in college where, when you just focus on that, everything else will take care of itself,” Ferrell said, via Vincent Bonsignore of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Raiders General Manager Dave Ziegler and head coach Josh McDaniels don’t have anything invested in Ferrell, but they also didn’t have a hand in anything that went wrong in his first three seasons. If Ferrell can do something with that blank slate, he may have a future with the Raiders after all.
