Las Vegas Raiders running back Ashton Jeanty has been operating at less than full strength since an ankle injury in August. He has since added a foot issue to the equation, and this lack of explosiveness has rendered him unable to overcome already shoddy run blocking. It's tough to evaluate him fully.
The Raiders are clearly not going to give Jeanty a game or two off to get healthy, and Week 8 against the New York Jets felt like a get-right opportunity. Then, Jeanty criticized the willingness of some Jets defenders when it came to tackling, which put him in some hot water.
Come game day, and Klint Kubiak didn't give him the opportunity to back up his talk.
Fourth-round rookie running back Mike Washington Jr. started the game against the Jets, as Jeanty went without a carry until the second quarter. When it was all said and done for the game, Washington had 25 carries to Jeanty's two, and he outsnapped him 38 to 25.
It's not like the Las Vegas rushing attack has been so great that new things shouldn't be tried, so credit to Kubiak there. The head coach also denied that Jeanty was at all being punished for his comments about the New York defense that they were facing.
Jeanty also took a mature approach to getting such little work, making it clear that the shift toward Washington Jr. was communicated to him beforehand. But regardless of how it went down, it went down. And it's time to re-evaluate the decision to select him at No. 6 overall last April.
Re-evaluating the Las Vegas Raiders' selection of Ashton Jeanty
As the Raiders ushered in another new general manager-head coach tandem in 2025, there was, of course, a ton of work to do on the roster. Using the No. 6 overall pick on a running back felt like a less-than-ideal use of that resource, even as much as everyone apparently liked Jeanty.
Plus, it was notably a very deep draft class at the running back position.
The players who were taken with the two picks right after Jeanty, offensive tackle Armand Membou and wide receiver Tetairoa McMillan, would look pretty good in Silver and Black right now. Running backs like Bhaysul Tuten, Cam Skattebo and Woody Marks were not taken until the fourth round.
When those backs have received the same level of opportunity in the NFL that Jeanty has, even taking different overall situations into account, Jeanty has not accounted for the draft investment gap by being markedly better than any of them.
Jeanty's recent run of struggle is not a death knell for his career. But it's starting to lead us toward an unignorable possibility that maybe he wasn't the best selection for the Raiders at the time, and the organization would have been better served taking someone else.
Ashton Jeanty may not have been a slam-dunk John Spytek draft pick
It has become very clear that Pete Carroll was a head coach hire made with little or no input from general manager John Spytek. Simply by talking about how aligned he and Kubiak are, with the clear insinuation he and Carroll were not at all aligned, Spytek has revealed plenty about that relationship.
Some of Carroll's comments since being fired have pointed the finger at Spytek for how the roster was built. Carroll's golden child, Geno Smith, was not put in a great position to succeed last season, and it's surely everyone else's fault. At least that is what the veteran head coach seems to believe.
Spytek was, and is, tasked with building a roster that can get to success and sustain it. Carroll, as expected given his résumé and age, came to Las Vegas in win-now mode. Despite his best efforts to try to put a square peg into a round hole, the roster to get that done did not exist.
A head coach like Carroll would see a workhorse running back as the fix for a rushing attack that hadn't been very good. A more reasonable assessment would've pointed elsewhere with the sixth overall pick, with deference to taking a running back from a loaded draft class later on.
Ryan Paganetti, who has been doing incredible work on social media as an analyst this season following his gig as a Head Coach Research Specialist for the Raiders under Carroll, has told us that, once Las Vegas is eliminated this year, he'll reveal who was responsible for the Jeanty decision.
And while we're not rooting for the Raiders to fall out of the playoff picture, getting the answer to this question will be quite the consolation prize.
None of this necessarily means that Jeanty will be a bust or be fully proven to be an exceptionally awful pick. But the Raiders taking him sixth overall had its immediate critics, due to where the rest of the roster was, and we just saw what should be the low point with his two-carry day in Week 8.
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