NFL Insider Talks Raiders, Cousins Trade and Mendoza Promotion

It’s Fernando Mendoza time in Las Vegas.

Feels about right. Seems about time.

This season is not going to be a magical breakthrough. The Raiders and the defense still need a tremendous amount of work. But they accomplished, as an organization, about all that could be expected from the nine games in the Kirk Cousins era. They were able to take a budget signing and use it to win some games, change the direction of the franchise somewhat and then flip him into a third-round pick.

Mendoza, the first-overall pick in the draft and the young man who literally has this entire franchise in his hands and the weight of finally budging it forward in a meaningful way, got to watch Cousins operate the offense at a very high level and have him as a constant sounding board and resource in the meeting rooms and on the practice fields and studying film together at night. And now Mendoza has two months to begin to chart his own course and do it with the team focused on the future and do it with tempered expectations.

It may be as close to a perfect balance as you can find in developing a quarterback, and the fact it was authored by the greatest quarterback of all time – minority owner Tom Brady – immediately lends even more credence, and there is reason to believe that Mendoza will be better off for that mentorship than he ever could have been taking over this rebuild in Week 1.

"I really like the way they brought him along," one GM told me of the Raiders’ plan. "Cousins was the perfect guy for that offense in the first half of the season, and now you see what Mendoza can do."

And there is reason to believe that Mendoza can be functional and handle the mental side of the game, and he’s been able to run through everything this offense has been through with Brady and Cousins and rookie head coach Klint Kubiak, who won a Super Bowl with Sam Darnold with this offense in Seattle last year. They remain short on wide receivers and the offensive line still needs work, and they aren’t running the ball the way many thought they might.

It’s no utopia, to be sure.

But Mendoza benefitted from an elite quarterback room in the first two months of his career and he will get top notch coaching and film reviews, and Mendoza showed if nothing else last year at Indiana that he could take a leap and alter the perception that scouts and evaluators had of him.

Now it’s time to start finding out.

"I believe in this kid, I really do," former Raiders MVP Rich Gannon told me this summer after watching him closely in the preseason. "I think he has everything you need to succeed."

Former Super Bowl winning quarterback Phil Simms, who studied him in depth in college, felt the same way. "He’s got a great chance to help them win games, and I like that they are taking their time with him."

Kubiak is going to have to strip some things down in this offense. They may have to lean into his legs more often to try to sustain a run game – certainly scouts expect to see more designed bootlegs and moving around the launch point for where the ball is coming out. "It’s going to be a lot of 12 and 13 (personnel)," one NFL exec suggested, noting heavy tight end sets, even more than Kubiak already tends to.

The Raiders are leading the NFL in usage of two tight ends (over 48% of their snaps), but he is deploying three tight ends only 7% of the time (18th in the NFL). We expect that to increase and the inability to run the ball may require more brute force and big bodies no matter who the QB is.

Cousins is a master at selling play-action looks out of heavy personnel and getting explosive gains from it; some of that had to rub off on the protégé with that being such a point of emphasis in this offense and it’s one area other teams will be looking at on film as they prepare to face him. Certainly, Kubiak will keep some guardrails on Mendoza on third down that didn’t exist for Cousins.

This will be a baptism by fire of sorts, even given the delayed start. Kubiak faces his former employers, the Super Bowl champs with their vaunted defense in Mendoza’s debut and then the Broncos and Browns – legit test. We’ll see if the Chargers are still winless by the time they meet in mid-December, coming off the bye, and the schedule subsides from there. Vegas avoided tearing down anything else with the roster and it’s all about building around Mendoza now.

If nothing else, there is a feeling of renewal and rebirth for a 4-5 team that has been more interesting and compelling than we are accustomed to the Raiders being. Mendoza will bring a new energy and Kubiak can start crafting the player he was hired to most heavily invest in, and not the avatar who was always going to be in his place for at least a few months to show him the way.