The Las Vegas Raiders have had the No. 1 pick just twice before in the 66-year history of the franchise — and both times, they selected a quarterback. One, in 1962, was a good pick: Roman Gabriel, who wasn’t quite a Hall of Famer but was damn close to it. The other, in 2007, was decidedly less good: JaMarcus Russell, one of the worst busts in NFL history.
Assuming the franchise doesn’t trade the pick away — Polymarket traders give that option a 5% chance — the Raiders will almost certainly add a third name to that list: Heisman Trophy-winning QB Fernando Mendoza, who just led Indiana to one of the greatest seasons in college football history.
Raider fans are already very excited for Mendoza to don the Silver and Black. But much to their annoyance, there has also been some chatter around potentially trading down from the pick and using the spoils — plus whatever Maxx Crosby fetches if he gets dealt as well — to build out the rest of the team in anticipation of a stronger projected QB draft class in 2027 (with Julian Sayin, Dante Moore,1 Arch Manning and others).
Last week, Bleacher Report floated the idea of Las Vegas trading the No. 1 pick (and a sixth-rounder) to the Arizona Cardinals for Kyler Murray, the No. 3 pick and next year’s first-rounder as well. Meanwhile, on the Rich Eisen Show, they debated the thought of passing on Mendoza with top pick to instead draft a defensive player and target a quarterback next year:
And Freddie deBoer, one of my favorite writers on this very platform, made the case that the Raiders would regret not trading down from the No. 1 pick.
His basic arguments: This roster is too broken for Mendoza to come in and fix as a franchise savior. Sticking a rookie QB behind a porous line would only stunt his development. Instead, in what’s considered a single-elite-QB class, the Raiders should exploit the massive gap in perceived value between No. 1 overall and the rest of the draft to stockpile assets for the future.
By trading down for a haul of picks, selling high on Crosby and taking a flyer under center on a distressed asset like Murray, Las Vegas could build a sustainable foundation across multiple other positions, rather than gambling everything on a single QB prospect. Or so the thinking goes.
I don’t really disagree with the overall premise. Beyond the analytics-approved concept of trading down to avoid the overconfidence trap — I myself wrote that No Team Can Beat the Draft 12 years ago — there is also embedded within this argument the notion that bad supporting casts ruin top QB prospects. And that’s also a premise I’ve put stock in before, too, writing that the NFL creates a vicious quarterback-drafting cycle — in which struggling teams continually spend high picks on QB prospects, only to see them underperform behind the same bad supporting casts, forcing the franchise to return to the draft and repeat the process indefinitely.
This trend has been even further reinforced in recent years, as reclamation-project QBs like Jared Goff, Baker Mayfield, Daniel Jones and reigning Super Bowl winner Sam Darnold have found success after leaving the teams who originally drafted them highly. It makes you wonder whether the problem with draft “busts” is more often the team doing the drafting and (lack of) developing, not the player.
Along those lines, we can even measure how much going to a bad team hurts a quarterback’s production early in their career. Looking at all QBs selected going back to the 1980 draft, there is a clear relationship between a quarterback’s Expected Points Added (EPA) above replacement during his first five NFL seasons and the previous quality (per SRS ratings) of the team who drafted him, even after controlling for where the QB was drafted.
Across all rounds, for every additional point of SRS better the drafting team2 is, a quarterback can expect to put up 3.0 more EPA above replacement over their first 5 seasons. This effect is statistically significant, suggesting (unsurprisingly) that there is real benefit to any QB landing in a better situation, wherever they are drafted.3 But the effect grows stronger for better prospects in a nonlinear way. Isolating just first-round QBs, the effect per point of SRS is 16.3 EPA above replacement, far higher than the effect for all drafted QBs overall:
And if we include interactions in our regression model to allow the slope of the effect to vary by draft value, the five-year benefit of going to a team 1 SRS point better ranges from about 8-9 EPA at the end of Round 1 to 17-18 EPA at the very top of the NFL Draft.
So, in the case of a QB like Mendoza, going first overall to the Raiders (-10.5 SRS last year) would historically be associated with roughly 110 fewer points of EPA value over his first five years — nearly 22 per season — relative to if he went to, say, a merely below-average team like the Cardinals instead. (In 2025 terms, that’s the difference between being Justin Herbert or Jaxson Dart and being Mac Jones or Jacoby Brissett.)
Those are average outcomes, of course. For every Jim Everett, Jared Goff and Jim McMahon, who went into less-bad situations and thrived — or Alex Smith, Vinny Testaverde and Sam Bradford, who struggled on bad teams — there are also cases like Donovan McNabb, Matthew Stafford and Cam Newton, who put up good early numbers despite going to teams who’d been terrible. Which archetype Mendoza would fit with the Raiders is anybody’s guess at this point.
It’s also worth noting that No. 1 overall picks still tend to rise above the fray, generally speaking. The reason why draft-value charts assign such a steep value to the top pick in the draft is that they tend to deliver disproportionately more value than other picks, despite the nature of the draft’s order being that they have disproportionately worse teammates. A No. 1 pick QB playing for a -10 SRS team would be expected to produce more value than the No. 5 pick playing with a league-average supporting cast.
(There are also QBs like Patrick Mahomes, who walk into talent-laden situations and still manage to exceed even the expectations set out for them there. Supporting casts explain only so much about who rises or falls.)
More broadly, though, Mendoza’s case illustrates the structural paradox around what happens when we send the league’s best young quarterbacks to go play with the league’s worst rosters otherwise. Unfortunately, the NFL effectively stacks the developmental deck against its most valuable assets — even if they’re not always doomed to outright fail, they are seldom put in a position to succeed.
(Though plenty of other factors are at play as well, this phenomenon helps explain that social-media stat floating around that Eli Manning won two-thirds of the Super Bowls by No. 1 pick QBs this century — and only he did it with his original team.)4
Yet, teams keep playing the game anyway. General managers know that passing on a quarterback at No. 1 can get them fired if he turns into a star elsewhere, while drafting one and watching him struggle is often just the cost of doing business. As long as elite quarterbacks are viewed as the most important ingredient in winning at the highest level, the cycle will go around and round.
That’s why the Raiders almost certainly won’t take Freddie’s advice — and why Mendoza will be at a greater disadvantage in Las Vegas than he would be elsewhere. That’s not to say they shouldn’t take him anyway, nor that he doesn’t have the talent to overcome the circumstances around him. But doing so is a bet that Mendoza can manage to avoid becoming just the latest entry on the long list of talented QBs asked to rescue broken teams before those teams were actually ready to be rescued.
Filed under: NFL
Who opted out of entering the 2026 draft a few months ago.
Or the debut team, in the cases of QBs like Eli Manning and Philip Rivers, who didn’t actually play with the teams who technically drafted them.
This is in spite of the fact that better teams tend to provide fewer opportunities for rookies to start and/or contribute than worse teams.
Matthew Stafford in L.A. was the other.
Good stuff Neil. With the #2 pick the hapless Jets (my favorite team of course) would be a candidate to screw up Mendoza as well given their history. But at least the Jet offensive line is in better shape and they have a RB in Breece Hall who's likely to be franchised. Still as you note, I can't see the Raiders bypassing Mendoza.
A rare case where Betteridge's Law of Headlines isn't true! At least I certainly hope so. Nothing against Mendoza, but I think the Raiders putting a rookie QB behind that swiss cheese of an offensive line is a great way to guarantee two wins for all the other AFC West teams.