Five weeks into the 2026 NFL season, the Las Vegas Raiders are playing football in the AFC West with a 38-year-old first-year head coach, a 21-year-old rookie quarterback sitting on the bench waiting his turn, a veteran QB who has been very good but never quite elite, and a minority owner who won seven Super Bowls and is now helping shape the franchise he never got to play for.
This is actually the most coherent plan the Raiders have had in years.
Let’s establish what happened to get here, because the setup matters. Pete Carroll came out of retirement at 74 years old with an infectious brand of positivity and a genuine belief that he could turn around a franchise that had gone 4-13 the previous season. He was wrong. The 2025 Raiders finished 3-14, tied for the worst record in the NFL. Geno Smith, reunited with Carroll in a trade from Seattle, threw 17 interceptions and led the league’s worst offense. The Raiders lost by double digits nine times and were held to fewer than 10 points five times. Carroll was fired January 5, 2026. It was the third time he had been dismissed in his first season with a team, and by far the most painful outcome given the credibility of his record elsewhere.
The 3-14 season produced something valuable: the number one overall pick in the 2026 NFL Draft, the Raiders’ first since JaMarcus Russell in 2007. What they did with that pick, and who they hired to coach the team around it, is the story of a franchise that finally did the right things in the right order.
Klint Kubiak Said “Hell Yeah” on the Field After the Super Bowl
The hiring of Klint Kubiak deserves its own moment of appreciation for sheer cinematic timing.
Kubiak was the offensive coordinator of the Seattle Seahawks, the team that just won Super Bowl LX on February 8, 2026, beating the New England Patriots 29-13. While still on the field in the immediate aftermath of the championship, NFL Network caught up with him for an on-field interview. They asked if he was heading to Las Vegas as the Raiders’ next coach. “You guys know I’m going to Las Vegas,” Kubiak said. “I’m fired up about it. Hell yeah, I’m going.”
That is one way to introduce yourself to your new city.
The Raiders officially confirmed the hire the following day. Kubiak, 38 years old and now one of the NFL’s youngest head coaches, brings a specific credential that Tom Brady and GM John Spytek valued above everything else: he knows how to develop quarterbacks who were previously written off. Sam Darnold was a cautionary tale for six years. Then Kubiak got him in Minnesota and the Vikings won 14 regular season games. Then Kubiak went to Seattle, Darnold followed him there, and the Seahawks won the Super Bowl.
Brady’s fingerprints are all over the hiring. Brady and Spytek were college teammates at Michigan, and the front office rebuilt the roster with Brady’s quarterback-centric philosophy explicitly in mind. Sports Illustrated reported the Raiders wanted a head coach who “mirrored” Brady’s leadership qualities. What they found was a 38-year-old quarterback whisperer with a Super Bowl ring who calls plays himself and understands exactly what a young signal caller needs to succeed.
Fernando Mendoza and the Patience Plan
The first overall pick was not a difficult decision. Fernando Mendoza led Indiana to a perfect 16-0 season in 2025, won the Heisman Trophy, won the national championship over Miami and Carson Beck, and collected essentially every college football award available to a single player in a single year. His arm talent, his accuracy on NFL-level throws, and his football intelligence generated consistent superlatives from evaluators who don’t use them casually.
He also grew up in South Florida, was lightly recruited out of high school, had to transfer to California before eventually landing at Indiana for one transformative season, and carries the kind of hard-fought backstory that franchise cornerstones tend to have.
The Raiders signed him to his rookie contract in July and then made a decision that has defined the season so far: they would not start him Week 1. Instead they signed veteran Kirk Cousins to lead the offense, absorb the early-season bumps, and give Mendoza time to learn the NFL game without being asked to carry a team that had just spent $281.5 million on the first day of free agency.
Kubiak’s reasoning is consistent with everything he has done before. He did not rush Darnold. He built his offenses around structure and patience and the idea that a quarterback’s development is best served by preparation rather than trial by fire. “I want Fernando and I want Aidan to push him,” Kubiak said of the competition between Mendoza and backup Aidan O’Connell behind Cousins. The message: earn it.
Pre-season projections had Mendoza’s debut arriving somewhere between Week 3 and Week 8 depending on how quickly Cousins either secured the job or gave it up. As of Week 5, Cousins remains the starter. The timeline is being managed deliberately, which is exactly what patience looks like when you are executing it correctly.
What Five Weeks Looks Like
The Raiders’ record through five weeks is not the most important number. The most important numbers are the ones hiding inside the box scores: is the offensive line working better with center Tyler Linderbaum and a healthy Kolton Miller at left tackle? Is Ashton Jeanty, the 2025 first-round pick whose rushing production was largely wasted by last year’s dysfunction, beginning to find the seams that a functional run game creates? Is the defensive unit that Carroll and coordinator Patrick Graham could never get right showing signs of coherence under a new scheme?
Those are organizational health indicators. They tell you more about where this franchise is heading than wins and losses in a rebuilding year.
What is already visible: the offense runs more variety. Kubiak’s play-action-heavy system, which helped Darnold in both Minnesota and then Seattle, is designed around pre-snap manipulation and formations that create confusion rather than raw athleticism trying to beat coverage. It suited Darnold. It should suit Mendoza, whose processing speed and understanding of coverage keys was praised consistently during his college evaluation.
Maxx Crosby, the Raiders’ best defensive player and one of the better edge rushers in the league, remains the anchor of a defense that needs building around him. If the Raiders can get Crosby consistent help and Mendoza into the starting lineup in a controlled situation, the late portion of the schedule against the Browns, Chargers, Broncos, Titans, Cardinals and Chiefs becomes interesting in a developmental way rather than merely painful.
Tom Brady’s Real Role
Brady’s involvement in Raiders football is an ongoing subplot that the NFL has not quite decided how to handle.
He won six Super Bowls with the New England Patriots. He won a seventh with Tampa Bay. He retired in 2022, took a broadcasting job at Fox Sports that pays him $375 million over ten years, and became a minority owner of the Raiders in 2024 with approximately a 5 percent stake.
The dual role, team owner and game analyst for Fox while serving as minority owner of a team in the league he is analyzing, has generated concern from other NFL owners since it was approved. The theoretical conflict is real: Brady has access to coaching staffs, players, and game-week preparation in ways that most broadcasters don’t, and he also has an ownership stake in one of the franchises.
What he also has, demonstrably, is genuine influence on the Raiders’ football operations. The coaching search that produced Kubiak was led by Brady and Spytek. The philosophy driving the roster construction, building around a young franchise quarterback with an offensive mind who can develop him, is Brady’s philosophy. When he talks to Mendoza, as he reportedly has done regularly since the draft, he is giving the No. 1 overall pick access to arguably the greatest quarterback in NFL history.
That is either a significant competitive advantage or a conflict of interest the league has not resolved. Possibly both.
The Sixth Coach in Six Years Reality
Before getting too optimistic, the Raiders are still the Raiders. Kubiak is the franchise’s sixth head coach in six seasons counting interim coaches. Mark Davis fired Bisaccia after a playoff year, McDaniels mid-season, Pierce after one year, Carroll after one year. That pattern is not a distant memory. It is the recent history that every Raiders fan carries into this rebuild.
The 3-14 season that produced Mendoza and the clean-slate opportunity was not just a strategic gift. It was another year of losing in a city that is getting better at being a sports town and deserves better football. Las Vegas Golden Knights fans have seen championship-caliber hockey. Las Vegas Aces fans have seen WNBA championships. The Raiders have given their fan base three-win seasons and ten-game losing streaks.
Kubiak’s first year will not produce a playoff berth. The realistic ambition for 2026 is demonstrating the offensive system works, developing Mendoza in a controlled environment, winning enough games to show competitive progress, and establishing the culture that winning programs require before they actually win.
Whether Mark Davis gives Kubiak the time to do all of that, given his track record with coaches who needed time, is the most important organizational question in Las Vegas football right now. Kubiak said “hell yeah” on a Super Bowl field in February. The Raiders have until December to show they meant it.
Key Insights
The Raiders’ $281.5 million first-day free agency spending, combined with the Kubiak hire and Mendoza selection, represents the most coherent and fully resourced rebuild attempt the franchise has made since relocating to Las Vegas, aligning coaching philosophy, quarterback development strategy, and roster investment around a single explicit vision.
The Kirk Cousins bridge quarterback strategy, delaying Mendoza’s debut to protect his development rather than exposing him to a rebuilding offensive line before it gels, reflects a deliberate patience that previous Raiders regimes demonstrably lacked and mirrors the approach Kubiak used successfully with Darnold before the Super Bowl season.
Brady’s operational role in coaching searches, roster philosophy, and direct mentorship of Mendoza creates competitive advantages in player development that are difficult to quantify but increasingly visible in organizational decision-making, alongside legitimate unresolved conflict-of-interest questions about a broadcasting partner with ownership stakes in an NFL franchise.
The pattern of six head coaches in six seasons creates both a credibility deficit that Kubiak must overcome with patient ownership and a cultural context where players have learned to tune out turnover and wait for the next change, making early-season culture establishment the most important non-football challenge the new staff faces.
Sources
Las Vegas Sun: Carroll Firing
FOX5 Vegas: Kubiak Hire
FOX5 Vegas: Mendoza Rookie Contract
Fox News: Cousins Named Starter
PFF: 2026 Raiders Preview
NFL.com: Raiders Clinch No. 1 Pick
