Silver And Black Pride
Veteran adds much-needed depth and experience but Las Vegas long-term planning at position group needs focus
Sometimes, football fate meets football reality.
Such is the case for Germaine Pratt and the Las Vegas Raiders.
When the veteran linebacker found himself cast aside by the Cincinnati Bengals — the team that drafted him in the third round (72nd overall) of the 2019 NFL Draft — the proclamations the Silver & Black sign a much-needed defender to bolster a position of need arrived faster and with more determination than Bo Jackson when he took the handoff against the Seattle Seahawks back in 1987.
Raider Nation and reporters alike quickly connected the dots on a Pratt-Raiders union. And just two days after the Bengals released their former team captain and stalwart linebacker, Pratt and Las Vegas agreed to a one-year contract worth up to $4.25 million.
As our Matt Holder delved into mid-June, the 29-year-old adds another quality run defender to the Raiders linebacker corps. Pratt is an instinctual linebacker who can diagnose quickly, use his strength to blast blockers backwards, and is patient to not get lost in the flow of traffic. His 143 total tackles and five stops for loss in 2024 along with his total sum of 118 tackles and seven stops behind the line of scrimmage in 2023 are a testament to Pratt’s skillset.
But even with the addition of the 6-foot-3 and 250-pound North Carolina State product (the same school that produced current Raiders wider receiver Jakobi Meyers and punter AJ Cole III), Las Vegas linebacker room remains a patchwork unit.
And the long-term outlook on the position group is equally as hodgepodge.
The group of Pratt, Elandon Roberts (31 years old), Devin White (27), and Jaylon Smith (30) are the old heads of the Raiders linebacker room.
Roberts, the elder statesman, heads into year 10 in the NFL after arriving to the scene as a sixth-round pick in the 2014 draft by the New England Patriots. Smith, the second oldest, heads into his seventh season and is a reclamation project as he came into league as the Dallas Cowboys’ second-round pick in the 2016 draft.
White, the youngest of the veteran group heads into year seven and is another reclamation project as he was the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ fifth-overall pick in the 2019 draft.
Each of those aforementioned names are on one-year deals and have plenty to prove to themselves, the Raiders, and the rest of the NFL. Pratt and Roberts represent the most defensive snaps and production out of the veteran group with the former logging 1,078 snaps in 17 games (17 starts) with the Bengals in 2024 with the latter earning 478 snaps in 17 games (14 starts).
In comparison, White played only 176 defensive snaps in 2024 while Smith didn’t play this past season. So it’s clear-cut competition for the vets and younger linebackers on the roster with one glaring item still to be seen: Just how many linebackers will the...
