One of the biggest surprises of the 2025 NFL Draft was the fact that the Las Vegas Raiders passed on former Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders nine times before he was selected by the Cleveland Browns.
The Raiders were heavily linked to the quarterback for months due to his connection with minority owner Tom Brady. The fact that Las Vegas kept passing him may have kept other teams from pulling the trigger.
While Sanders certainly has his faults, nobody outside of the NFL could’ve predicted he’d slip as far as he did. Kristopher Knox of Bleacher Report was surprised the Raiders didn’t take him as a developmental project to sit behind Geno Smith.
“The Las Vegas Raiders didn’t need to chase a quarterback early in the draft,” Knox wrote. “They traded for Geno Smith early in the offseason and recently signed him to a two-year, $75 million extension.
“Given Smith’s history with new head coach Pete Carroll, he’ll likely remain the starter for the foreseeable future. However, Smith will turn 35 in October, and the Raiders should be interested in developing a signal-caller for the future.”
Raiders Could Regret Not Taking Sanders ‘in a Big Way’
Time will tell how good Sanders ends up being, but if he’s a star, a lot of teams are going to be kicking themselves. Knox believes that the Raiders are among the teams that are going to regret not selecting the quarterback.
“Now, according to ESPN’s Pete Thamel, several teams didn’t view Sanders as a ‘first-round talent and a first-round player.’
“Las Vegas might have been one of those teams. However, the Raiders had multiple opportunities after drafting Jeanty and Bech and before Cleveland stopped the slide to add Sanders as Smith’s understudy. They didn’t, and in a year or two, they may regret it in a big way.”
The Raiders aren’t the only team that could’ve taken Sanders and didn’t. If he’s amazing, every quarterback-needy team in the NFL is going to be frustrated.
Raiders Looking for Toughness in Players
The Raiders didn’t directly address why they weren’t interested in Sanders, but they did drop some hints.
Sanders has only ever been coached by his father and grew up with immense privilege. That doesn’t necessarily mean he doesn’t work hard, but he may not have the edge that Las Vegas is looking for.
“There’s not going to be a place for you in this organization and this team if you aren’t willing to go out there and lay it on the line all the time,” general manager John Spytek said. “You’ll get weeded out pretty quick. So I feel like as a personnel guy and with our scouts, we’ve got to find the right kind of mentality to bring that to life.
“Otherwise, they’re going to show up and by mid-August, (Carroll’s) going to say, ‘Well, these guys, they won’t give me their all’, and that’ll be a big miss by us.”
Perhaps the Raiders didn’t think Sanders had the grit to be part of their program, but it’s could just be more likely that they didn’t think he was a valuable prospect and they’d rather use their picks on other players.
