The Las Vegas Raiders' miserable 2025 NFL season has one glaring silver lining: The No. 1 pick in the 2026 NFL Draft. Winning meaningless games has prevented the Raiders from this coveted selection in recent years, but things were a special kind of dysfunctional and uncompetitive under Pete Carroll.
Turning things around will be no easy feat for Las Vegas, but it starts with landing the right head coach and quarterback combination. Free agent signings have done the team no favors under center, so the Raiders absolutely must use their top pick to select a young college signal-caller.
Geno Smith is the foremost example of this, as he followed in the footsteps of Jimmy Garoppolo and Gardner Minshew as failed veteran additions to the quarterback room in Las Vegas. Cutting Smith should be the first move of the offseason for general manager John Spytek.
Raiders must cut Geno Smith before they do anything else this offseason
Finding a trade partner for Smith would be ideal, but believing that another team would mortgage a draft pick or a player to acquire him in his current form is wishful thinking. A trade would wipe his entire contract off the books for the Raiders, so that would clearly be priority No. 1.
But instead of dragging things out and hoping that will happen, the Silver and Black just need to cut ties with Smith and take on the penalty of an $18.5 million dead cap hit. While that seems like a big number, Las Vegas would save $8 million in the process and still have over $110 million to spend.
Keeping Smith around wouldn't provide much benefit, unless Spytek, the front office and the coaching staff believe that he'll gladly mentor a rookie quarterback. Fans certainly have their doubts about him in a bridge role, but that would be the only circumstance to keep him.
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Kenny Pickett played his way out of staying in Las Vegas with two poor showings in Weeks 15 and 18. Aidan O'Connell is under contract next year, unlike Pickett, and while he didn't exactly star in his lone appearance this season, he's the better option as a backup for the Raiders.
Cam Miller was recently poached from the practice squad, so Las Vegas doesn't really have a young, developmental signal-caller anymore, either. There are two routes forward for the Raiders in terms of how they structure the quarterback room, and there is clearly one better option.
The first is that the team drafts a quarterback at No. 1 overall, keeps Geno Smith as the bridge, and Aidan O'Connell as the emergency third-string quarterback. The second, and more intriguing, is that the team drafts two quarterbacks, one as a developmental piece, and let's O'Connell be the backup.
An incredibly cheap and young quarterback room like this, combined with a first-time head coach from an offensive background, would give Raider Nation the most hope moving forward. Parting ways with Geno Smith is the catalyst for that process, so it should be Spytek's first offseason decree.