Sportsnaut
The Las Vegas Raiders have two real competitions on their hands at training camp, and neither one involves a quarterback.
Everybody covering this camp is fixated on the Kirk Cousins and Fernando Mendoza situation, which is fair given the money and the timeline attached to it. But quietly, the Raiders are also sorting out who kicks their field goals and who snaps for their punter, and both jobs are wide open for the first time in nearly a decade. Daniel Carlson held the kicking job for eight seasons. The Raiders didn’t bring him back after he posted an 81.5% field goal rate last year, his worst mark since his rookie season in 2018, and that opened the door for a real fight in Henderson.
Matt Gay is the presumptive front-runner, at least on paper. He’s a seven-year veteran who made a Pro Bowl with the Rams in 2021 under new Raiders special teams coordinator Joe DeCamillis, and the familiarity there matters. But Gay’s own numbers have slipped too. He hit just 73.9% of his field goals in 2025, which means the Raiders didn’t necessarily upgrade at the position so much as they reset it. That’s the part of this story that gets lost when people assume “veteran signing” means “problem solved.”
The name to actually watch is Kansei Matsuzawa, the “Tokyo Toe,” an undrafted rookie with maybe the best origin story in camp. He taught himself to kick by watching YouTube videos after attending a Raiders game in Oakland back in 2018. No college scholarship path, no traditional pipeline, just a guy who decided he wanted the job and built his own route to it. Teammates call him “Special K,” and DeCamillis has taken a hands-on interest in getting him there.
“Matt has really helped Special K quite a bit,” DeCamillis told reporters in June. “He’s done a good job of getting him squared away with some of his technique… The competition’s been good. Hopefully we can get Matt back on the same plane that he was when I had him in LA. And I think Special K’s gonna be really good too down the road. Should be a hell of a competition.”
That’s a coach talking up his kicking room, not a coach picking a winner. Conventional thinking, and reporting from the beat guys on the ground, say Gay will win the day,.
Long snapper is the same situation, different names. The Raiders signed Alex Ward, who spent three seasons with the Rams and appeared in 38 games, giving him the kind of proven reliability teams want at a position nobody notices until it goes wrong. Competing against him is Tyler Duzansky, an undrafted free agent out of Penn State who led the nation in tackles by a long snapper in 2023,...
