Raiders enter a new era with Carroll, Brady forging the path

The surroundings stayed the same, but the proceedings were entirely different.

The Las Vegas Raiders have annually held an open-to-the-public, mid-training camp practice or two at Allegiant Stadium to drum up interest going into the season. In the past, the team has typically run through obligatory drills at less than full speed while a couple of the star players address the crowd.

That wasn’t a good enough plan for new Raiders coach Pete Carroll this year. He decided to stage a “mock game” pitting the Raiders’ first-string offense and second-string defense in white jerseys against the second-team offense and first-team defense in black jerseys.

Carroll demanded full effort out of his players, though they did not tackle to the ground, and appealed to fans to take in the event. Approximately 18,000 showed up on short notice, and the buzz was palpable with seven-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback Tom Brady watching from the sidelines.

The players ran out of the home tunnel to “The Autumn Wind” instrumental as usual, but the roar was louder with sights like Carroll jogging on the sidelines and playing catch with his trademark pair of white gloves.

“The new Raiders are here,” superstar edge rusher Maxx Crosby announced right before the mock game began. “It’s 2025 now. We’re ready to show up and hit somebody in the mouth.”

Crosby remains the face of the roster, but everything else has changed in the nine months since the Silver and Black last took the field.

The 28-year-old who signed a three-year, $106.5 million contract extension this offseason — briefly record terms for a non-quarterback — has been hardened by the weight of expectations and the consequences of falling short of them in the NFL. Now on his fifth coach in his seven-year career, Crosby has long grown frustrated with questions about what makes each of them different and reticent to share anything of substance.

But the vibe of the mock game got to him; he couldn’t deny a refreshed feeling for the franchise.

Carroll is the architect of the transformation. The future Hall of Famer will be the oldest coach in NFL history by the time of the Raiders’ second game this season when he turns 74 years old, but he hasn’t let age slow his zest.

Many wondered if Carroll would ever get another job in the NFL after the Seattle Seahawks forced him to step down following 14 seasons two years ago, but he was determined and kept pursuing opportunities. And he wasn’t doing it with the intention of helping a team go through a long rebuild; winning was the only thing on Carroll’s mind. “I’ve been winning 10 games a year for 20 years or something, you know,” Carroll said at the outset of training camp. “I mean, what are my expectations? We are going to win a bunch, and I don’t care who hears it. It doesn’t matter to me. It ain’t about what anybody hears. It’s about what we do.”

None of Carroll’s Las Vegas predecessors ever made that bold of a proclamation. Sure, they talked about returning the Raiders to glory by winning another Super Bowl but also hit the trite talking points of doing it gradually and building something sustainable over time.

Ten wins looks like a high bar for a team that went 4-13 in 2024, its worst campaign out of five seasons since moving to Las Vegas. The Raiders have only won 10 games twice in the past 22 seasons, the span in which they hold the NFL’s second-longest drought without a playoff victory.

Carroll has hit the 10-victory benchmark nine times in his NFL career — not to mention seven times in nine years during his dominant college football run at USC from 2001-2009 — and gotten to nine wins on four other occasions.

He’s implemented the same principles that resulted in championships in Seattle and USC in Las Vegas, and the reminders are everywhere. At the players’ entrance of the team facility in Henderson, for example, Carroll had “Always Compete” spelled out in bold, block letters to serve as a subtle reminder of his daily expectation.

“He’s super energetic,” said quarterback Geno Smith, who also played for Carroll in Seattle. “I don’t know how he does it, but like the guy wakes up, it seems like he just pops out of bed, man. He’s just fired up as soon as he wakes up. He brings the juice every single day. When you have a leader like that at the helm, you have no choice but to fall in line.”

Carroll empowered Smith, whom he advocated for the Raiders to acquire via trade for a third-round pick and extend with a two-year, $85.5 million pact, and Crosby to lead the way and set the standard for their teammates at the start of training camp. He’s raved about the way they’ve executed the task.

Other stars who have emerged at the forefront in exhibiting Carroll’s philosophy include the Raiders’ past two first-round picks, tight end Brock Bowers and Ashton Jeanty. Bowers has drawn praise from Carroll for the hard-working, unassuming attitude he carries into every day, while Jeanty’s hard-running style is a natural style for what the coach is trying to instill.

Carroll has also assembled possibly the most veteran-laden linebacking corps in the NFL, including a pair of Super Bowl champions in Elandon Roberts (Patriots) and Devin White (Buccaneers). He’s also reassigned his own former Seattle star safety, Jamal Adams, to the position and signed longtime Bengals linebacker Germaine Pratt, who sealed the Raiders’ loss in their last playoff appearance with a goal-line interception in 2021.

That group has come to embody the spirit of this year’s Raiders, but the team’s radical shift started months before they were brought on board. The roots of this year’s change in direction can be traced back to early last season, when the NFL owners met in Atlanta and approved Brady as a minority owner of the Raiders.

Majority owner Mark Davis was never overly meddlesome like some of his peers but, burned by years of poor performance on the field, he wanted to take an even more hands-off approach going forward.

He leaned heavily on Brady and a group of other new minority owners, which also includes former Raiders standout Richard Seymour and several venture capitalists, for this offseason’s coaching search.

The group momentarily thought they could land the prize of this year’s coaching cycle in Ben Johnson, but he ultimately chose Chicago over Las Vegas. Carroll was the clear next choice, hired shortly after Brady reunited with former University of Michigan teammate and Tampa Bay Buccaneers executive John Spytek by bringing him on as Raiders general manager.

Carroll’s exuberance for the chance to work with Brady may have been no small influencing factor.

“We’re going to lean on Tom as much as we can for his insights,” Carroll said at his introductory news conference. “He’s that unique.”

Brady is mostly staying in the background with the Raiders — he hasn’t spoken to media about joining the team — to fulfill the terms of his conflict-of-interest agreement to maintain his job as a Fox color commentator. But he’s briefed regularly and been around on occasion, including for the mock game and the Raiders’ lone home preseason matchup, a 22-19 loss to the San Francisco 49ers.

The other new minority owners might be making just as big of an impact. Teams are capped at how much they can spend on their roster by NFL rules, but there’s no limit in terms of staff and support.

The Raiders have flexed with the new capital in both categories.

Carroll poached veteran coach Chip Kelly away from Ohio State, where he won a national championship last season, by making him the highest-paid offensive coordinator in NFL history at $6 million per year. Spytek beefed up his personnel staff including with Brandon Hunt, who was considered instrumental in helping build last year’s Super Bowl-winning roster in Philadelphia.

Las Vegas has also invested more in areas like sports science and analytics to catch up with the rest of the league.

“I was always kind of an eye-test guy,” said assistant general manager Brian Stark, another new hire. “But there’s so much information available, and it’s so much more efficiently evaluated. The applications for it are almost endless. We’ve got a great team upstairs and they go through so much information that it would take us days to do, and they do it in minutes and really refine the presentation.”

Many of Las Vegas’ roster moves have hinted at their new, more analytical bent. Spytek refused to overpay free agents and let a slew of players such as linebacker Robert Spillane, safety Tre’von Moehrig, cornerback Nate Hobbs and edge rusher K’Lavon Chaisson walk when they drew offers that far exceeded their production.

In the NFL Draft, he went with a more modern approach of trading down aggressively and taking high-ceiling prospects. The Raiders already appear to be reaping the benefits, with three rookies expected to contribute significantly right away — Jeanty, third-round cornerback Darien Porter and fourth-round receiver Dont’e Thornton.

Three others are virtually guaranteed rotational roles — second-round receiver Jack Bech, fifth-round defensive tackle Tonka Hemingway and sixth-round defensive tackle J.J. Pegues.

“We came in here with Coach Carroll,” Bech said. “We’re his first draft class, and we take a lot of pride in that. We take a lot of pride in being a Raider.”

A lot of pride was on display throughout the mock game. Smith led a scoring drive inside three minutes to take a lead, throwing a touchdown pass and running in a two-point conversion himself, but Crosby’s black team answered to win 38-36.

One key play came in the first half when Crosby strip-sacked backup quarterback Aidan O’Connell and returned the fumble 70 yards for a touchdown. For all of Crosby’s accolades, scoring is something he’s never done in an NFL game.

This could be the year that changes. Carroll and crew anticipate breaking ground on a lot of new territory.

“We’ve been meshing together as a team, building the culture, building who we are and our identity on a daily basis,” Crosby said.

This story appeared in Las Vegas Weekly.