The Las Vegas Raiders didn't hire a quarterbacks coach right away, but now Mike Sullivan is joining the coaching staff.
The Las Vegas Raiders have been making a lot of changes lately, but one that didn’t quite happen when new coach Klint Kubiak announced his staff was the hiring of a new quarterbacks coach Mike Sullivan to work with presumptive top draft pick Fernando Mendoza.
Yesterday the Raiders corrected that oversight by adding Mike Sullivan as quarterbacks coach, according to a report from Connor Byrne of ProFootballRumors.com via Tom Pelissero of the NFL Network. Sullivan was supposedly on the Raiders’ radar back at the beginning of the month when they made most of their coaching staff announcements, and he was actually interviewed “a few weeks ago,” per Mike Garafolo of the NFL Network.
Sullivan was actually on track to join the college ranks this season as a senior offensive assistant for Rutgers, but now the 59-year old coach will get his fifth go-round as an NFL QB coach. He started his coaching career back in 2002, and Sullivan has had a fair number of successes and failures, with the biggest success coming with the New York Giants back in 2010-11 when he worked with quarterback Eli Manning and the Giants won the Super Bowl.
His second stint with the Giants didn’t go as well. He was bumped up to offensive coordinator in 2016, but the Giants’ offense struggled to score and he was let go after two subpar seasons.
Sullivan returned to his role as quarterbacks coach with the Broncos in 2018, but the combination of QB Case Keenum and coach Vance Joseph helped make him a one-and-done. He surfaced again with the Pittsburgh Steelers as they tried to transition away from Ben Roethlisberger, but former coach Mike Tomlin wound up shifting him from quarterbacks coach to senior offensive assistant back in 2024.
This hire actually speaks to one of the hidden issues with the Kubiak hire. He made his reputation with the Seattle Seahawks based on his work with Sam Darnold and the team’s Super Bowl run this year, but now Kubiak will have a lot on his plate that will leave him with far less time to do one-on-one work with Mendoza and whatever veteran quarterback the Raiders presumably add in the next few weeks.
The recent mess with the Maxx Crosby trade provides a good example of how that will work, although that situation is extreme by any standards. Las Vegas has been consumed by the ongoing news, rumors and recriminations following the botched trade, and given that this is the Raiders, there will certainly be more internal and external fires to put out.