Pickleball, cornhole, Jenga and 41 holes of golf.
That’s how General Manager John Spytek unwound following the conclusion of his first draft with the Raiders.
After having a few days to reflect on the three-day event, he sat down with Raiders.com’s Eddie Paskal to discuss the team’s draft strategy and the 11 new members of the Silver and Black.
The Raiders made a splash in the first round by selecting Ashton Jeanty, making him the highest-drafted running back since Saquon Barkley (2018).
As fans waited anxiously to see who would join Jeanty in the Silver and Black, Spytek and his staff were working the phones to acquire more draft capital.
“You never know quite how the draft’s going to go,” he said. “How many of these guys are going to really push the starters that are here, the position groups that are here, I don’t know. Sometimes you get a third-round pick and you think he’s going to be the one, then it turns out it’s the seventh-round pick that does it.
“But that’s why those Day 2 trades, I think, were important for us. There were players on the board that we liked there at 37 and a little bit further down, and we felt like it was a great opportunity to get a few more premium picks and load up a bunch of different position groups with as much competition as possible.”
The Raiders ended up using five of their first six draft picks on offensive players, but Spytek says there wasn’t an overarching plan behind that approach.
“It was really the way the board fell,” he said. “We had good defensive players sprinkled in throughout there too. When we were up to pick, the way we stacked the board and the way we pull names off the board, the best names were just the ones at the top and they ended up being offensive players more often than not. I’ve never been anywhere where I regretted having good football players on the roster, wherever you feel like they start or however they get to where they’re at. You just like having good football players.”