The Las Vegas Raiders have signaled they will go into a full rebuild and star defensive end Maxx Crosby isn't willing to go down that road.
The belief around the National Football League is that Las Vegas Raiders star defensive end Maxx Crosby has played his final snap as a Raider.
And that belief has gotten stronger after a report came out Monday that Crosby is allegedly done playing for the organization.
According to Jason La Canfora of Sportsboom.us, an anonymous general manager said that Crosby directly told Tom Brady, minority owner of the Raiders, that he ‘will never play for the Raiders again.’
“That’s a fact,” said the anonymous GM. “He told them he’ll retire before he ever plays for them again. But I’m not sure they’re actually going to trade him. Myles Garrett said the same thing last year, and we know how that ended up.”
When the Cleveland Browns’ star defensive end requested a trade last season, he wound up signing a four-year, $160 million contract extension to stay with the team. The suspicion is that the Raiders won’t be able to pull that off.
This comes out after Fox’s Jay Glazer reported that Crosby was fed up with the idea of rebuilding and that the team shut him down for the last two games of the season despite Crosby insisting he was healthy enough to play.
The five-time Pro Bowler went as far as posting videos of himself and his daughter playing basketball and jumping on a trampoline on his social media to prove that he was healthy enough to keep playing. Crosby hates missing games, especially if he’s fully capable of playing.
The Raiders, who won’t admit they were tanking for obvious reasons, shut down Crosby and All-Pro tight end Brock Bowers among others to make it easier to secure the No. 1 pick in this year’s draft. And it worked.
As we mentioned over the weekend, ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler reported that Crosby wants to play for a winner and he had made it clear that he wanted to stay in Las Vegas, but it just doesn’t seem like he can do both. The Raiders are far from being contenders and need to build from the ground up.
The most efficient but painful way for the Raiders to maximize their rebuild would be to trade Crosby, who Glazer mentioned would bring in an absolute haul. A haul that would be bigger than the return that the Dallas Cowboys got when they traded star edge rusher Micah Parsons to the Green Bay Packers.
If the report is true, trading Crosby seems imminent and at this point, that is the best thing for both parties. Fowler noted that he believes as many as 20 teams will have interest in Crosby and field a significant offer for his services.