Las Vegas Raiders quarterback Jarrett Stidham (3) warms up before an NFL football game against the Kansas City Chiefs at Allegiant Stadium Sunday, Jan. 1, 2023.
Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2023 | 9:45 a.m.
Las Vegas woke up to the news this morning that Tom Brady, at age 45, had again decided to retire from playing professional football.
If it sticks this time, it ends one battle in an ongoing civil war among Raider Nation over the quarterback position.
Raider fans, rather than pontificating on the relationship between Las Vegas head coach Josh McDaniels and his former New England Patriots signal caller destined for the Hall of Fame five years from the date he submits those retirement papers, can instead turn their focus toward whether the team should try to reunite star receiver Davante Adams with his former quarterback, also a future Hall of Famer, Aaron Rodgers.
Or the Raiders can take whatever they manage to get in trade for Derek Carr, package it with their own first-round pick and Darren Waller or Hunter Renfrow — or both — and move up to the No. 1 pick to draft former Heisman trophy-winning quarterback Bryce Young.
Las Vegas’ fan base has for five years been engaged in a vicious war of words over the future of the position. Each offseason has been met with intense scrutiny over Carr’s performance as the factions debated the importance of the quarterback’s play vis-a-vis the team’s record, as opposed to the defense’s, or the offensive line’s, or the receivers' or coaching staff’s.
From rumors of former coach Jon Gruden’s love affair with drafting quarterbacks — even though he never did draft one in the first round of his head coaching career — to yearly trade and free agent scenarios involving Rodgers, Brady, Russell Wilson, Deshaun Watson and others, Carr rarely, if ever, enjoyed a peaceful offseason. For that matter, the relatively high-dollar value of his backup’s contract for two years influenced many fans to call for his benching midseason in favor of Marcus Mariota.
Quarterback is the most polarizing and important position in football. It’s the one position that some stat geek decided to attach to win-loss record, and if a team hits a home run drafting one high, that team has an enhanced chance to benefit from that pick for a decade. Teams that swing and miss on one, though, can suffer multiyear franchise setbacks.
It’s a high-stakes decision, so we can expect those conversations to continue without Brady’s name involved.
His retirement, though, should never have mattered. He was never the right move for this organization. And neither is Rodgers. Young may be, if a deal can be made, but perhaps the best solution is already in the building.
Jarrett Stidham should be the Raiders’ starting quarterback this fall, this summer and this spring.
For all the talk about McDaniels’ relationship with Brady, the past four years, it’s been Stidham who has been in McDaniels’ quarterback room. McDaniels has invested four years in developing Stidham and traded a draft pick to bring him to Las Vegas last offseason.
Signing Brady, or trading for Rodgers, or drafting Young, would signal to Stidham that he has no chance to earn the long-term starting job, so he would have no incentive to re-sign with the team.
Stidham, who was at one time the most coveted high school quarterback recruit in the nation, is 26 years old and entering his fifth NFL season. He doesn’t need to sit and learn the position from Brady or Rodgers. If he still needs to learn after four years of learning — and for that matter, if he was willing to take a back seat to either of those players at this point in his career rather than fighting for a starting job somewhere else — he isn’t the guy you’d want leading your team anyway.
And with his performances in the last two games of the 2022-23 regular season, Stidham earned the right to be taken seriously by NFL teams looking for a starting quarterback, particularly Las Vegas.
He played with poise and moxie against the league’s best defense, leading a team without playoff aspirations to overtime and nearly a win against NFC Championship Game participant San Francisco.
And the next week, while the team managed only 13 points against Super Bowl-bound Kansas City, it’s hard to lay blame on a quarterback who put two balls in the hands of his best receiver in the end zone and got nothing for it. They would have been difficult catches to make, but the throws were put where they had to be.
Stidham did his part in that game.
And yet, re-signing Stidham should be significantly less expensive than paying Carr would have been, freeing up valuable salary cap space to re-sign running back Josh Jacobs and make needed improvements to the defense and offensive line.
If Stidham can give McDaniels — whose promise as a head coach is maximizing results from the quarterback position — even the same relatively low level of play as Carr did this year (by Carr’s standards), then enhancements across the rest of the roster enable the team to be more competitive immediately.
Immediacy is no guarantee from a rookie quarterback.
Lastly, re-signing Stidham to a modest, one- or two-year prove-it deal would still not take the Raiders out of the QB draft market. It would simply allow them to hold their cards closer to the chest.
By trading Carr, choosing not to trade for Rodgers and not committing to Stidham for a year, the Raiders would be signaling to the league their intent to select a quarterback with the seventh overall pick in the NFL Draft this April.
That makes it less likely that a QB they do covet would slip to them, as other QB-needy teams would know they’d need to trade up in front of Las Vegas to get one.
But committing to Stidham now would not prevent the team from taking, say, Ohio State’s C.J. Stroud in the unlikely event he was available. Nor would it take the Raiders out of the market for a quarterback later in the draft, such as Tennessee’s Hendon Hooker, Stanford’s Tanner McKee or Fresno State’s Jake Haener.
The Raiders would still need a backup, after all, and one of those guys could sit and learn from Stidham.
Dave Mondt is an editor at the Las Vegas Sun.
