Veterans reported to the Intermountain Health Performance Center in Henderson yesterday, July 28. The first practice follows today. And for the first time since the Raiders arrived in Las Vegas in 2020, the team enters training camp without the weight of a coaching staff that inherited problems it did not create, a roster built around priorities that no longer apply, or a culture still negotiating its relationship with a city it moved to under difficult circumstances.
Klint Kubiak is the Raiders’ head coach. He is 39 years old. This is his first training camp as an NFL head coach at any level. The playbook he installed during the offseason draws from the Shanahan-McVay offensive tree that has produced some of the most sophisticated football systems in the modern game. The quarterback competition heading into camp features Fernando Mendoza as the presumptive leader, but Kubiak has framed the room as genuinely open. “Everybody in the quarterback room is a top-tier quarterback and it’s going to be competing with each other, not competing against each other,” Mendoza said this week, signaling the tone the new coaching staff has set for a competition that will shape the Raiders’ offensive identity throughout the 2026 season.
Five public training camp practices are scheduled. Four run August 2, 3, 7, and 8 at the Intermountain Health Performance Center in Henderson, with tickets complimentary but requiring advance reservation. The facility practices were sold out as of July 16. The fifth open practice moves to Allegiant Stadium on August 11 at 6 p.m., with $5 tickets available through raiders.com and all proceeds directed to the Raiders Foundation supporting military members, veterans, health initiatives, and youth development.
That $5 Allegiant Stadium practice is the most accessible entry point for Las Vegas fans to see this new-look Raiders team in person before the preseason begins.
The Kubiak Inheritance
Pete Carroll was fired after one season following a 3-14 record, the worst in the league. The circumstances of Carroll’s hiring, brought in at 73 to stabilize a franchise in genuine organizational distress, were unusual from the start. The results were predictable given the roster’s condition, the coaching transition, and the challenges inherent in asking a coach of Carroll’s age and profile to rebuild rather than compete.
Kubiak inherits a team that has been through multiple coaching changes, roster overhauls, and cultural resets in a relatively short window. The challenge he faces is not simply installing a system. It is establishing continuity, building trust with players who have experienced instability, and creating the kind of practice culture that translates into competitive performance during a regular season that offers no grace period for teams still working through identity questions.
“He’s got a real chip on his shoulder,” one Raiders insider noted of Kubiak this week. That chip has a specific origin. Kubiak was passed over for head coaching opportunities before landing in Las Vegas, building his offensive coordinator résumé across multiple NFL stops without getting the chance to run his own program. The chip is productive if it drives preparation and staff alignment. It becomes a liability only if it leads to stubborn adherence to systems that the available roster cannot execute.
The offseason brought significant roster changes. Three players were signed on Monday alone, including defensive end Patrick Johnson, linebacker Buddy Johnson, and wide receiver Deven Thompkins, while three others were waived. This kind of roster movement in the days before camp opens is normal, but the scale of change across the entire roster over the offseason has left Las Vegas entering camp with what one assessment called “many unknowns,” a phrase that reads as warning but also contains genuine possibility.
The Quarterback Question
Fernando Mendoza is the Raiders’ most visible offseason story. The 2026 ESPY winner, who shared the podium with A’ja Wilson among the night’s top honorees, came through a minicamp in June looking like the kind of athletic, accurate passer that Kubiak’s system rewards. The offense Kubiak intends to run leans on quarterback mobility, quick processing, and the ability to execute play-action concepts off a running game that creates genuine defensive conflict.
Mendoza possesses those tools. What training camp will reveal is whether he can apply them consistently against NFL-caliber pass rushers running full-speed defensive packages, a different test than the controlled environment of OTAs and minicamp provides. The jump from controlled offseason work to competitive training camp practice is where quarterback competitions either clarify quickly or remain genuinely unresolved into the preseason.
Kubiak’s framing of the quarterback room as collaborative rather than purely competitive reflects modern coaching philosophy around the position, the understanding that quarterbacks who feel supported by their backups rather than threatened by them tend to perform with more confidence and communicate better with the coaching staff about what they are seeing. Whether that philosophy survives the competitive realities of training camp practice reps will be one of the most closely watched storylines across the next three weeks.
What the Preseason Schedule Reveals
The Raiders open the preseason at home against the Arizona Cardinals, the second consecutive year these teams meet in the preseason following the Cardinals’ 20-10 win last August. Preseason Week 2 sends Las Vegas to Houston to face the Texans, a matchup that has not appeared on the preseason schedule since August 2005. A third preseason game completes the slate before the regular season begins.
The Arizona opener gives Kubiak a home game to introduce his coaching staff and system to the Allegiant Stadium crowd before taking the team on the road. Home preseason openers serve a specific function for new coaching staffs: they allow the crowd to see the new identity being installed without the pressure of a meaningful result, building familiarity and, ideally, optimism before regular season stakes arrive.
The August 11 open practice at Allegiant Stadium occupies a specific position in the preparation calendar. It falls after the first week of public practices at the Henderson facility but before the preseason opener, giving fans a chance to see the team in its home venue while the coaching staff completes its final training camp evaluation before trimming the roster toward preseason game readiness.
The Fan Experience Opportunity
Las Vegas Raiders training camp represents a distinctly different kind of entertainment experience than the concerts, residencies, and sporting events that dominate the city’s summer calendar. Watching an NFL team practice is not passive entertainment. It is access, the chance to see professional athletes and coaches working through the mundane repetition that produces performance rather than simply experiencing the polished result.
For football-focused visitors to Las Vegas in August, the combination of a $5 Allegiant Stadium practice on August 11 and the Raiders’ preseason home opener against the Cardinals creates a football-centric itinerary around which hotel stays, restaurant visits, and broader entertainment spending can be organized. This is exactly the kind of sports tourism that Las Vegas has cultivated systematically since the Raiders’ arrival in 2020, and training camp is the most accessible entry point in that entire ecosystem.
The Raiders Foundation benefit embedded in the $5 ticket pricing adds a charitable dimension that the team has consistently integrated into its community engagement strategy. Proceeds supporting military members, veterans, and youth development resonate in a city with a significant military and veteran population in the surrounding valley communities that extend well beyond the Strip into Henderson, Summerlin, and the broader metropolitan area.
The Broader Raiders Narrative
The Raiders’ move to Las Vegas in 2020 generated the kind of skepticism that accompanies any franchise relocation. The questions centered on whether a football team could build genuine civic identity in a transient entertainment city, whether Las Vegas fans would show the sustained loyalty that regular season NFL attendance requires, and whether Allegiant Stadium could compete with legacy markets for the atmosphere that makes stadium football compelling.
Those questions have largely been answered. Allegiant Stadium has been full for Raiders home games. The fan base, a combination of longtime Raiders followers who relocated to Las Vegas over the decades and new fans who adopted the team when it arrived, has demonstrated the sustained engagement that translates into season ticket sales and game-day economic activity.
What has remained elusive is competitive success. The Raiders have not won a playoff game since their 2021 Wild Card victory over Cincinnati. The coaching changes, roster instability, and cultural turbulence of the intervening years have produced frustration that Kubiak now inherits along with the opportunity.
Training camp is where narratives begin rather than end. The first day of full-squad practice today will not determine whether the 2026 Raiders are a playoff team. It will begin establishing whether the foundation Kubiak is building can eventually support one.
The Allegiant Stadium Summer
The August 11 Raiders practice at Allegiant Stadium arrives in a summer that has already seen the venue host Ed Sheeran’s LOOP Tour on July 18, the Fuerza Regida sold-out stadium show on July 10, and AC/DC’s Power Up Tour arriving August 1. The Raiders practice on August 11 fits into a venue calendar that has run almost continuously through the summer with events of varying character but consistent economic impact.
This programming density reflects Allegiant Stadium’s operational maturity. The venue opened in 2020 with significant questions about how heavily it could be programmed around the Raiders’ NFL schedule. Six seasons in, those questions have been answered by a booking calendar that treats the stadium as a year-round entertainment asset rather than a football venue with occasional concerts.
For Las Vegas, the Raiders’ training camp opening today marks the beginning of football season in the most literal sense, the moment when the city’s NFL franchise goes from theoretical off-season roster construction to observable, measurable preparation for a season that will generate hundreds of millions in economic activity across hotels, restaurants, sportsbooks, and entertainment venues from September through January.
The Silver and Black are back on the field. The unknowns are real. And the 2026 season starts today in Henderson, one practice at a time.
Key Takeaways
The Las Vegas Raiders opened the 2026 training camp today with veterans reporting yesterday, July 28, marking the beginning of Klint Kubiak’s first training camp as an NFL head coach. The quarterback competition centered on Fernando Mendoza, combined with significant offseason roster reconstruction, creates genuine uncertainty and possibility heading into a season that follows a 3-14 record under Pete Carroll.
Five public training camp practices, including a $5 Allegiant Stadium session on August 11 with proceeds benefiting the Raiders Foundation, give Las Vegas fans and summer visitors direct access to the new-look team before the preseason begins. The Arizona Cardinals preseason opener at Allegiant Stadium provides the first competitive look at Kubiak’s system in a game environment.
Training camp access represents a distinctly different entertainment value proposition than the concerts and residencies that dominate Las Vegas’s summer calendar, offering proximity and insight rather than spectacle, and drawing football-focused visitors who extend their stays and generate broader economic activity throughout the valley.
The Raiders’ sustained presence in Las Vegas since 2020 has answered early questions about whether an NFL franchise could build genuine civic identity in a transient entertainment city. What remains to be established is competitive success, and the foundation for whatever the 2026 season produces begins being laid on the practice fields in Henderson today.
Sources:
– Raiders.com Training Camp Updates: https://www.raiders.com/news/raiders-2026-training-camp-updates-nfl-preseason-transactions-news-highlights
– Raiders.com Open Practice Schedule: https://www.raiders.com/news/raiders-open-practice-schedule-2026-training-camp-tickets
– Raiders.com Training Camp Preview: https://www.raiders.com/news/what-to-know-2026-raiders-training-camp-joint-practice-preseason-open-practice
– SI.com Training Camp Schedule: https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/onsi/las-vegas-full-training-camp-schedule-dates-locations-practices
– Identity Vegas Training Camp Guide: https://www.identity.vegas/las-vegas-raiders-2026-training-camp-open-practice-schedule/
