With a new coaching staff comes automatic changes. While Rob Leonard is a holdover from Pete Carroll's staff and Antonio Pierce's staff before that, he is new to his role as the Las Vegas Raiders' defensive coordinator. And, with that, a shift to a 3-4 base scheme is professed to be coming.
It's easy to overblow that change, with nickel effectively being the base defense around the NFL these days. But the move from a 4-3 to a 3-4 does bring different required skill sets and physical profiles for certain roles in a defense, and the Raiders' future additions on defense will reflect that.
Beyond currently known free agents, players who are cut by other teams and may fit the change in defensive scheme could land on the Raiders' radar. As is always the case, history with key people in the organization could inform and drive interest in those kinds of players. Like Javon Hargrave.
Raiders should easily avoid Vikings veteran DT Javon Hargrave
While the Raiders are near the top of the league in available cap space and cash spending need, the Minnesota Vikings are on the opposite end of the spectrum, as they are more than $45 million over the projected salary cap as the month of March dawned.
The sooner they start the effort to get compliant, the better. In that effort, they have reportedly already told a couple of veterans, barring a trade suitor swooping in, that they will be released at the start of the league year on March 11.
One of those veterans who's on their way out in Minnesota is Hargrave, a defensive tackle. The Vikings are clearly trying to trade him, but it looks like he will just be cut. His one season with them started nicely with two sacks in Week 1, but he finished with just 3.5 over 16 games.
Hargrave has made most of his hay in recent years as an interior pass rusher, with lackluster Pro Football grades and average metrics as a run defender that are backed by the eye test. But he has seen noticeable snaps in his career at nose tackle, which is where he would best fit in Las Vegas.
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Raiders Vice President of Player Personnel Brandon Hunt was the pro scouting coordinator for the Pittsburgh Steelers when Hargrave was drafted by them in 2016, and he was in the Philadelphia Eagles scouting department in 2022, the last of Hargrave's three seasons there.
Las Vegas' Senior Personnel Executive, Anthony Patch, spent more than two decades in the Eagles' scouting department before coming to the Raiders last year. While his work in Philadelphia was on the college scouting side, he presumably did some work on Hargrave before he was drafted in 2016, too.
Hargrave was also with the San Francisco 49ers in 2023, when head coach Klint Kubiak was the passing game coordinator there. That is three fairly major connections to Hargrave, and stuff like that matters in the NFL.
The Raiders should leave few, if any, stones unturned in the effort to add talent to the roster this offseason. Hargrave's potential fit for the new-look defensive front in Las Vegas should be explored with that in mind.
But it should be easy to see he's not a viable full-time nose tackle, and he's not an ideal 3-4 defensive end either. Add in that he's 33 years old, and the fit gets even worse on anything other than an "if all else fails" bargain contract.