It’s clear the Las Vegas Raiders a franchise in transition.
The team fired offensive coordinator Chip Kelly midseason and head coach Pete Carroll after just one year — the two men who were brought in to be catalysts of a much-needed culture change.
Vegas also headed into this offseason relying more on minority owner Tom Brady to help lead the team’s rebuild around first-year head coach Klint Kubiak and presumed No. 1 overall pick Fernando Mendoza.
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“Expect Brady — who has spent little time in the Raiders building as he balances his broadcasting duties on Fox and other business interests — to increase his presence as the decision [to hire a new GM] closes in,” NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport and Tom Pelissero reported back in December.
While the Raiders may have been banking on Brady’s expertise as a seven-time Super Bowl winner, Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio is convinced Brady has sent the Raiders a message to not expect him to be more involved than he already is.
“In his newsletter, Brady nevertheless wrote this: ‘When I commit to something, I go all in,’” Florio stated. “It all comes back to the commitment he believes he made to the Raiders, and the commitment the Raiders believe he made. And the possibility that there’s a gap between the two.
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“Brady has the right to be involved in as many different business pursuits as he wants (with the exception of those that create obvious conflicts of interest). Still, his latest newsletter makes it clear that he’s currently wondering whether he’s doing too much.”
To Florio’s point, Brady does discuss having a work-life balance in his newsletter, implying that taking on too many responsibilities in the past was a detriment to that goal.
“If you’re doing too much, and you don’t take the time to recharge your social battery, then you start to slip, to make mistakes,” Brady wrote. “You start majoring in the minor stuff, neglecting the things that matter for the priorities most pressing at the moment. Worse, you start working at cross-purposes to them. … My goal is balance.”
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If Brady does take a backseat and is less involved in the football operations side of things, that puts more pressure on general manager John Spytek, who’s two years into his career as an NFL GM, to right the ship himself.
If Mendoza hits, that certainly makes things easier. If Kubiak is the second coming of Kyle Shanahan, that certainly helps.
But many around the league are convinced the Raiders wanted Brady to join the ownership group to reap the benefits of his winning aura. If he just does the bare minimum as a minority owner, it’s tough to see the Raiders being in a better spot than they are right now.