The Las Vegas Raiders have had a busy offseason in their first full league cycle under general manager Dave Ziegler. While they hired him in January of 2022, general managers stay active throughout the year scouting players to sign or draft, so he didn’t get a full opportunity to exact his vision for the team last season.
Ziegler inherited a mess from his predecessor Mike Mayock (as well as former Raiders’ head coach Jon Gruden, who had entirely too much control over the Raiders’ personnel decisions), and it’ll take him to clean it up. As of right now, the Raiders are listed towards the bottom of the pack in terms of their likelihood of winning Super Bowl LVIII this season: it’ll take some time to heal the wounds that Mayock and Gruden created, and it also doesn’t help that the division they compete in is one of the toughest in the entire league.
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For Ziegler, acquiring the kind of talent that he thinks the Raiders need most to succeed is only half the battle: he also has to root through the rest of the roster, deciding which holdovers from the Gruden/Mayock era to keep and who to send on their merry way. His first major offseason move was cutting loose a franchise staple in quarterback Derek Carr. Ziegler isn’t wasting any time with players he doesn’t think can put the team on the right track to win their first Lombardi Trophy since the 1980s.
One of Mayock’s biggest missteps during his three-season tenure at the franchise’s helm was the number of high-end draft picks he wasted. With players like hard-hitting safety Jonathan Abram, who showed flashes of potential with his physical play but could never put it all together; wide receiver Henry Ruggs, who the team cut loose after his involvement in a DUI car crash that killed a woman; and defensive lineman Clelin Ferrell, who never managed to do much of anything despite being picked fourth overall.
As such, the cupboard was pretty bare when Ziegler stepped in: he couldn’t even flip talented players for a new wave of Raiders who fit his idea for the team. Here’s a look at what Ziegler has done so far this offseason to continue retooling the Raiders’ roster: with a new wave of players in the building, the writing is on the wall for players who are soon to be replaced by young talent, or who don’t mesh with the team in its current form.
First and foremost is running back Josh Jacobs, a former first-round pick. One of the lone bright spots from the Mayock era, Jacobs racked up 2,053 total yards this past season, leading the league in rushing yards. The Raiders decided to give Jacobs the franchise tag, locking him into a contract for this season (should he choose to sign it) or giving them until the middle of July to work out a long-term deal. Should talks sour, Ziegler could always flip him for another player or a bounty of draft picks… or execute a sign-and-trade to get more value out of him if he’s already locked into a long-term deal.
On the other side of the ball, six of the Raiders’ nine draft picks were defensive players. After Las Vegas’ scoring defense came in 26th place (giving up an average of 24.6 points per game), that was the main area for them to address, even with the question marks surrounding presumptive starting quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo.
Cornerback is a particular area of concern for Las Vegas, as they had just one corner reel in an interception in 2022: 12 of the 90 players on the Raiders’ offseason roster are corners, as they want to give as many players as possible a look as they attempt to overhaul the position. Roughly half of those players won’t be on the roster at the start of the season so the cornerback battle will be a hot topic throughout training camp and the preseason.
Despite having more than enough cap space to do so, the Raiders didn’t go out and sign any top-flight players: the player they invested the most capital in was fourth-round draft pick, Jakorian Bennett. As such, it’s anyone’s guess how they trim the roster.
