Stephen A.: Tom Brady has to make Raiders’ No. 1 pick (1:31)Stephen A. Smith emphatically believes that Tom Brady should be the one making the Raiders’ pick at the top of the 2026 NFL draft. (1:31)
TOM BRADY HAS been assigned to call five Chicago Bears games this season. Five times he has watched as Ben Johnson, the head coach he wanted to hire for Las Vegas’ open job last year, led the Bears from the bottom of the division to the top.
“Ben Johnson has come in and changed the culture with his accountability and attention to detail,” Brady said on the Fox broadcast of the Week 16 Packers game at Soldier Field, a 22-16 Bears overtime win. “…When you are trying to turn around a losing organization, you need buy-in.”
“Brady has a lot of say in the organization,” said an agent of a Raiders client in December. “Pete will be gone, and Spytek will stay because Brady will want it that way. Mark Davis needed an influx of cash to operate at a different level. With new cash comes strings, and those strings are Tom Brady.”
“Who would want the Raiders job?” asked an agent of a Raiders player. “The coach who takes the Raiders job is the coach who takes any job. They know: ‘As soon as we have a string of losses — which we will likely have — they will be calling for my head and the owner is going to listen.'”
Davis, 70, usually looks boyish because of his youthful haircut, but on this night, he also sported childlike glee, and despite the Raiders’ 2-4 record at that point in the season, he eagerly detailed his franchise’s latest acquisition.
“Although Tom can’t play, I think he can help us select a quarterback in the future and potentially train as well,” Davis said. “It’s a huge benefit to the organization.”
That night in October, Davis wouldn’t detail a specific role for Brady. According to NFL rules, Brady can’t have a title other than “limited partner,” because a person with equity can only be a team employee if they are the controlling owner or are related to the controlling owner.
Since Davis took over as controlling owner in 2011, the team has had two winning seasons and no playoff wins. Six head coaches and five general managers tried to find success but failed. On Davis’ payroll today are three GMs and three head coaches, and five of the six do not work there anymore but are still under contract.
Davis points to head coach Jon Gruden’s resignation in 2021, following reports that he wrote emails with racist, misogynistic and anti-gay language, as the moment the Raiders’ process got “blown up.”
Interim head coach Rich Bisaccia went 7-5 and led the team to its most recent playoff appearance and winning season. Former Raiders general manager Mike Mayock, who worked with Gruden and was fired after the 2021 season, declined to talk to ESPN for this story, but he said via text message: “Had the Raiders kept Bisaccia after the 2021 season, they would be competing for divisional titles, not for the 1st pick in the draft.”
Instead, Davis hired Josh McDaniels and Dave Ziegler, then Antonio Pierce and Tom Telesco, neither lasting a full two years. Brady arrived at the end of last season, poised to take a bigger role. Davis fired Pierce. “Even starting with [firing] me, I think with me that was one of [Brady’s] calls,” Pierce told SiriusXM Mad Dog Radio in September.
Davis fired Telesco two days later, “after consulting with Brady and others,” The Athletic reported.
Neither Pierce nor Telesco had a strong connection to Brady. Brady was part of the interview panel in the hiring process for the Raiders’ next head coach and general manager, along with Mike Meldman, Egon Durban and Tom Wagner, limited partners who also joined the Raiders’ ownership group in 2024.
The Raiders hired first-time general manager Spytek, who was seen in league circles as the clear favorite for the job because he’d been a University of Michigan football teammate of Brady’s and a personnel executive for the Buccaneers during Brady’s three seasons in Tampa.
With a GM in place, hiring a good coach became the priority. Brady and the team settled on Ben Johnson, the hottest head coaching candidate of last year’s cycle. The seven-time Super Bowl champion went to work as a recruiter.
Per Sports Illustrated, Johnson had zero interest in even interviewing with the team until Brady got involved through intermediaries.
But Johnson took the Bears job before Las Vegas ever made him an offer — the Raiders’ history and turmoil too much to overcome. Johnson’s agent, Rick Smith, declined to comment to ESPN.
“There were three or four people that we were truly interested in,” Davis said in January. “And when one person made a decision to go to another team, it became clear that Pete [Carroll] was going to be our guy.”
A source close to Spytek says the general manager was not involved in hiring Carroll because the Raiders did not interview any new head coach candidates after Spytek was hired Jan. 21. The team announced Carroll’s hire Jan. 25.
Carroll, who turned 74 in September and became the oldest head coach in NFL history, was seen as the safe route in NFL circles, someone who had won at least 10 games in nine seasons — tied for 11th most by a coach in the Super Bowl era — and could jump-start the culture of a team that needed to reset. Carroll wanted to win immediately because, like Brady, winning seasons were all he had really known.
“We’re starting right now, going for it immediately,” Carroll said in an introductory news conference. “We don’t have some time that we’ve got to make it five, six years down the road. That’s not what we’re thinking.”
“We want to draft and develop because it’s the best way to build a solid foundation of a team and then to reward those players with second contracts,” Spytek said at the introductory news conference. “But if the opportunity comes to sign a Tom Brady or a Baker Mayfield or trade for a Jason Pierre-Paul or Rob Gronkowski — just examples of my career — we will absolutely do that when the team is ready.”
But even the coaching staff hires didn’t look like natural fits. The Raiders hired Chip Kelly away from Ohio State as their offensive coordinator, making him the highest-paid OC in the NFL. The two-time NFL head coach and former Oregon head coach had never worked with Carroll before, and The Athletic reported that it was Brady who was “a big advocate of bringing in Kelly.”
The Athletic reported that Brady was not in favor of signing free agent quarterback Sam Darnold. So the team traded with Seattle for quarterback Geno Smith, while Seattle signed Darnold, who has put together back-to-back 14-win seasons for two different teams.
“Tom definitely influences everything that goes on there,” said a third agent of a Raiders player. “The coaching hire, the Geno Smith trade, Matthew Stafford recruitment, he was involved with all that.”
Brady’s big swings for coach and quarterback — which seemed possible because of the allure of who he is and what he represents — winning and consistency — both missed, and Las Vegas wound up with two compromises at the two most important spots.
“Why couldn’t they get the coach and the QB that they wanted?” asked a personnel executive for another NFL team. “Because people view that place as a place of constant dysfunction. And now Tom is involved and what did this year look like? More dysfunction. Why would people that have options and choices be interested?”
“This isn’t a one-year, try to save it,” Spytek said. “This is a build the right way, set the franchise in the right direction, built for sustained success. Get it in a place where we [have] a young roster with a lot of good players, and then maybe there’s a free agent in a year or two, where you really go for it.”
The Raiders’ offseason strategy, however, sent mixed signals, three personnel executives for other teams told ESPN. Trading a third-round pick for then-34-year-old Smith and then signing him to a two-year, $75 million extension, drafting a running back with the No. 6 pick and signing a slew of veteran free agents, six of whom were in their 30s, didn’t look like the actions of team that Spytek said was building long-term.
“They have operated as a team that thinks they’re in their competitive window,” the first executive said. “Which is a mistake in strategy.”
“It’s a team and an organization that doesn’t know who they are,” said the second executive. “Before the year, you’d say they were not going to be very good from a personnel standpoint. Then Pete comes out and says, ‘I win 10 games all the time.’ But this [roster] was not even close to winning 10 games.”
“So many things needed to be fixed,” the third personnel executive said. “It wasn’t going to happen for them in Year 1. They were too far away. They had a string of first-round misses [under Mayock] Clelin Ferrell, Damon Arnette, Henry Ruggs III, Alex Leatherwood, and you can really see it in the roster.”
The run game, with prized first-round running back Ashton Jeanty, was nearly nonexistent, which put more pressure on a struggling passing game.
Smith threw nine interceptions through five games — the most by any Raiders quarterback in the team’s first five games of a season since Jim Plunkett in 1982 (9) and Meyers’ numbers declined before he was traded to Jacksonville at the deadline. He went from averaging 76 yards per game in the first three weeks to 34 yards per game in his final four games.
Even opponents had questions. In the Raiders’ loss to the Bears in Week 4, safety Kevin Byard III picked off Smith twice on the same look, in the first quarter and again in the second quarter.
“You won’t normally see those plays back to back,” Byard told ESPN. “I was surprised I got the same look, and I was able to capitalize off those plays.”
In October, Carroll had his own criticism for Kelly’s playcalling: “We don’t want to ever rely on the quarterback having to do the whole show and sitting in a shotgun, throw the football. I never coached that way. … We got to make sure that we’re calling all the best stuff in the situations.”