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Kirk Cousins is going to open the season under center for the Las Vegas Raiders, and at this point, saying so out loud barely qualifies as a prediction.
ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler reported this week that Cousins is “well-positioned” to be the Week 1 starter, with Fernando Mendoza working his way in behind him instead of getting thrown into the lineup in September. Coach Klint Kubiak has been signaling exactly this since the day he took the job, so Fowler’s report mostly confirms what anybody paying attention already assumed.
He did leave a little wiggle room, noting the staff could adjust if Mendoza shows up to camp and simply takes the job from Cousins through performance, but that’s the exception being described, not the plan.
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Mendoza’s ceiling isn’t in question for anybody in that building and I don’t think it should be for Raiders fans either. What’s in question is whether it makes any sense to hand a rookie the offense of a team that’s burned through three head coaches, a fired offensive coordinator, and a 3-14 season since the last time a Sunday in Las Vegas felt good. An offensive line still finding its footing under a brand-new coaching staff is not where you want a first-time NFL starter learning on the fly, no matter how good he looked at Indiana.
Cousins brings more to this than bridge-guy filler, too. He’s a year removed from the Achilles tear that ended his time in Minnesota early and complicated his stretch in Atlanta, and he’s not going to blow anybody away with his legs at this stage of his career. But he still reads an NFL defense pre-snap as well as almost anyone Kubiak could have signed, and that buys Mendoza the one thing a rookie quarterback actually needs before he plays meaningful snaps: time to watch without the season riding on his mistakes.
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Put the pieces together and the realistic picture is Cousins starting in October, Mendoza absorbing every rep and every meeting without the pressure of Sunday attached to it, and a transition that probably lands somewhere around Week 7 or 8, once he’s got a real body of practice work against NFL defenses and Kubiak has seen enough to trust him with it. It’s not the Raiders being timid. It’s the first time in a while this front office has actually run a rebuild like a rebuild instead of hoping a talented rookie fixes everything by October.
How much wiggle room Fowler’s report actually left won’t get answered until pads come on at training camp. Until then, this is Cousins’ team, whether the fanbase has fully made peace with that or not. I think most of Raider Nation has.
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