The Las Vegas Raiders hit a crossroads with Maxx Crosby this week, and it wasn’t hard to see it coming. Crosby is their best player by far, and he goes flat-out at 100 percent for a bad team that’s rarely done that this year, and normally the last thing you'd want to do is shut a guy like that down when he still wants to play.
But that's exactly what the Raiders did, despite the risks that come with alienating Crosby. It may be logical medically given how long his knee injury has lingered, although it’s not safe to assume anything logical with this franchise given how kooky and upside-down things have gotten. Coach Pete Carroll has been living in his private fantasy world for months now, insisting that he’s installing a winning culture on a team that continues to lose game after game while putting an incompetent product on the field.
Crosby wanted to play, despite the fact that he’s been hobbled by a knee injury for weeks now, because that’s what he does. He was so upset by the team’s decision that he left the facility, and Carroll tried to sell the media on the idea that he approved of this despite the fact that it goes one hundred percent against the reaction the team was probably after.
There’s a lot that we don’t know about this. Just how bad were the medicals, anyway? Was this decision based on contract incentives that Crosby now won’t be able to each? Shortchanging Crosby on anything like that would be foolhardy given how important the defensive end to the franchise, both on the field and image-wise, but once again, this is Las Vegas, so assumptions like that are dangerous.
The Raiders have been walking a tight rope trying to keep Crosby happy for a while now, which hasn’t been easy given the canyon between how bad the Raiders are and how good Crosby has been.
They met with him shortly after things went south initially, but since that meeting things have gotten exponentially worse, and it’s hard to imagine Crosby being happy about anything that’s happened since.
This is a familiar drama in the NFL, and there’s really only one move that hasn’t been made yet—the Raiders trading Crosby for draft capital once Carroll gets fired after the season ends. There’s really no reason Crosby should trust the Raiders to fix this situation, much less hire a coach who’s even competent, so that will be the resolution during the offseason.
There's only one winner here, and it's not the Raiders. They'll get the draft capital they need, and Crosby won't be happy about leaving the franchise he's come to love. But the team that acquires him will get a model player, a team leader and a great edge rusher in his prime, and that's the win-win in what has otherwise been a disaster for both Las Vegas and Crosby.