The Las Vegas Raiders are looking for a quarterback, and minority owner Tom Brady will be leading the search. Brady hasn’t said a lot about how this is going this to date, but now that he’s momentarily finished with his job as Fox Sports’ lead analyst, he did make some comments to Saad Yousuf of The Athletic.
They weren’t exactly shocking or surprising, but that’s Brady to a T, right? He’s master the art of the generic comment, if indeed you can call that an art, but there were a few nuggets that are worth exploring.
Brady being Brady, he does have certain focal points that he references in interviews like these. The fact that he was the 199th pick in the draft is a well-known fact, but it’s easy to forget now that Brady had to wait several years for his opportunity to emerge.
“Nobody’s a finished product,” he said. “I don’t care if you’ve won the Heisman or if you’re the 199th pick in the draft. It’s what do you do when you get there? How important is this to you?”
One of his other comments scored high on the irony meter, however, when he talked about the organizational environment for a quarterback like Mendoza.
“All of these young prospects, I hope they go to environments that embrace them completely, that can help them develop into the best player they can be,” Brady said.
The Raiders’ environment isn’t the greatest, and the irony is that part of that is about Brady. He played a little game of “Where’s Brady” this past season when it comes to the team’s fortunes, showing up in the coach’s booth with headphones on when the Raiders were still viable, then disappearing completely when things went sideways.
Brady’s issues aside, the Raiders are in a bit of a tough spot when it comes to potentially drafting Mendoza. Their offensive line was a mess this year, and they couldn’t protect quarterback Geno Smith at all.
Hopefully the Raiders learned something from last year’s draft when Las Vegas took running back Ashton Jeanty with the number six pick in the draft. That became an ongoing exercise in futility when Jeanty struggled to find holes and rushing lanes behind a bad offensive line, and a rookie quarterback could face some serious health and safety issues behind that line.
Will they do the same thing with the quarterback this year? If that happens, this kind of failure will be a lot more expensive. Jeanty did enough in his rookie year to make it clear he can be a productive back, but the list of top quarterback picks who were ruined by a bad line is both ugly and extensive, as Brady himself well knows.