The Raiders are in the running for one of the top picks in the 2025 draft, but is there a quarterback at the top of the draft worth being excited about?
There doesn’t seem to be consensus on the top quarterback prospect among this year’s group, but Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders is the early favorite to be the first quarterback drafted.
There are reasons to believe the Raiders will be interested in Sanders, but many don’t consider him an elite prospect at the level of Caleb Williams or Jayden Daniels.
Yahoo and FOX Sports radio host Jason Fitz talked about the 2025 draft class this week and he has been told this year’s top quarterback would rank as the 6th-best quarterback in last year’s draft.
If accurate, the Raiders landed on a terrible year to need to quarterback while sitting on one of the top picks in the draft…
Looking specifically at Sanders, Sports Illustrated insider Hondo Carpenter touched on him in a recent podcast…
“I’m going to tell you a couple of things. And I don’t want to get into all these guys, but just a little bit. In the interest of full disclosure, I love Deion Sanders. Love the guy. He is not a friend, I’m not implying that, but away from football, I have had several interactions with him. I respect him personally,” Hondo said on the Las Vegas Raiders Insider podcast.
“Maybe sometimes the bravado is over the top, I admit that. But I like him and I respect him, and he is just an unbelievable father. There are some concerns with Shedeur that I’m hearing from scouts, and I’ll tell you what those are,” Hondo continued. “None of them are character, like he is a bad kid. But I’ll give you one example, and there are several, but I’ll give you one… He loses the Nebraska game and after the game in his press conference, he says, ‘How many times did the Nebraska quarterback get hit?’ And I had a scout tell me he not only threw his teammates under the bus, but he also threw his dad, because these are the kids his dad recruited under the bus. And he said, I know in our organization how we rate quarterbacks, that he took a huge hit…”
“[The same scout] gave me some others that I’m not allowed to share publicly, just because they don’t want to share all of their scouting, but because that one happened publicly, and so many scouts have talked about it,” Hondo said. “Carson Beck, there’s a lot of concern that he’s distant from his teammates. He’s not a bad teammate. He’s just, he’s a business guy. He walks out of the locker room, does his thing, and I’ve heard this from people at Georgia who get frustrated with him, and I’ve heard it from the scouts.”
A couple of players Hondo says he has heard good things about from the scouting community are two players that might not even be drafted in the first round…
“Jaxson Dart is a guy that I’ve not heard one blemish on. [Garrett] Nussmeier is a guy I haven’t heard a blemish on. I’m just giving people some names. The point of the matter is, you don’t want to get to the draft next year thinking, we got to get a quarterback if one’s not there, and you miss a Brock Bowers.”
It’s early, but right now it doesn’t seem like the most exciting outlook for any teams desperate to find a franchise quarterback in the draft.
