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An April report revealed that first-year Las Vegas Raiders head coach Klint Kubiak and team minority owner Tom Brady are serious about wanting 2026 No. 1 overall draft pick Fernando Mendoza to spend at least a part of his rookie season serving as a backup for free-agency signing Kirk Cousins.
Nevertheless, recent stories mentioning how Mendoza has impressed Las Vegas coaches have predictably caused some to wonder if he has a realistic chance to start the Raiders’ Week 1 home game versus the Miami Dolphins on Sept. 13. On Tuesday, NFL insider Jason La Canfora of SportsBoom US suggested that Raiders fans should get used to the idea of Mendoza watching games from the sidelines for now.
Kirk Cousins still on track to start over Fernando Mendoza in September?
“The Raiders have loved everything they have seen out of first overall pick Fernando Mendoza in the early stages of their spring practices,” La Canfora wrote, “and his mentality and work ethic continue to make a strong impression, by all accounts. But that’s also quite unlikely to alter their prescribed method of bringing the rookie along, team and league sources said, as rookie head coach Klint Kubiak also gets on-the-job training. There will be far less chatter about how good veteran Kirk Cousins looks with the team, with that to be expected, but he has been exactly the kind of winning stopgap Las Vegas envisioned when it landed him, and we continue to hear that Week 1 is very likely to be the domain of Cousins.”
In the summer of 2024, Brady said that he felt at that time it was “a tragedy that we’re forcing these rookies to play early.” Of course, Brady famously spent nearly all of his rookie season as a backup behind Drew Bledsoe after the New England Patriots made TB12 the 199th pick of the 2000 draft.
Brady reportedly is the Raiders’ “de facto boss when it comes to football matters,” so one would think he may have the final say regarding whether Mendoza is given a legitimate opportunity to compete for the starting job this summer. According to one unnamed NFL personnel executive who spoke with La Canfora, it sounds like the Dolphins expect to see Cousins in the Las Vegas lineup this coming September.
Kirk Cousins doesn’t plan on being a spectator in Week 1?
“Cousins isn’t there just to hold a clipboard for 17 weeks,” the executive said about the 37-year-old signing with Las Vegas earlier this spring.
The situation theoretically could change if Mendoza looks like a revelation during the preseason or Cousins experiences some sort of physical setback. Barring such a development, it seems people around the league believe Mendoza won’t take a meaningful in-game snap for some time.
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