The Las Vegas Raiders ended the 2025 NFL season experiencing the best of both worlds. The New York Giants' Week 18 loss ensured the No. 1 overall pick in April's draft will reside in the desert, and then they beat the Kansas City Chiefs to end the campaign with a victory.
And on Monday, the expected move to fire head coach Pete Carroll after one season happened.
With the first overall pick, the Raiders will have their choice of Indiana's Fernando Mendoza or Oregon's Dante Moore, assuming the latter declares for the 2026 NFL Draft. In the meantime, the hires at head coach and offensive coordinator will be critical to putting that young quarterback on the right track to start his career.
The Raiders and Curt Cignetti might be crazy enough to work
Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk recently wondered, in light of a clause in his contract that would theoretically open the door with the Hoosiers being a College Football Playoff semifinalist, if Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti will garner NFL interest as head coaching jobs continue to come open.
The 64-year-old Cignetti has never coached at the NFL level, so hiring him would be a huge gamble. That leaves out the idea he may, understandably, have zero desire to leave Indiana for the unknown of the NFL. It's also a rare college coach who enjoys anywhere near equal success in the NFL.
However, Florio took the idea of Cignetti to the NFL to a somewhat logical next step.
"If the Raiders are thinking about making Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza the No. 1 overall pick in the 2026 draft, why not think about pairing him with Cignetti?" Florio wrote. "In the 23 seasons since the Raiders appeared in Super Bowl XXXVII, they have had two playoff appearances and no postseason wins. They could do a lot worse than Cignetti, because they have."
On Monday's episode of his eponymous show, noted analyst Rich Eisen also wondered about the Raiders and Cignetti.
"If I'm Mark Davis, the first person I call, and I understand this would be out of the ordinary. And I understand I might be stirring something up that doesn't exist. But I wanna find out. ... I'm just gonna say it, if you don't mind.
"I'm going to say, I find out the phone number of Curt Cignetti. And I call him up, and I say 'Listen, I don't mean to disturb you'. ... I don't know if you're aware, but we hold the first pick in the draft. And you've got Heisman-doza quarterback that we're kinda interested in. And I don't know if you're interested in this pro game. ... But do you want to move to Las Vegas, Nevada, and be, still coaching your superb individual human being and quarterback Fernando Mendoza?"
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Eisen invited the notion that, if Cignetti didn't shut the door on becoming the head coach, the Raiders would keep their coaching search ongoing and possibly come back to him on January 20, the day after he would, in theory, "win it all" (as in, the national title).
Multiple NFL teams, in Eisen's opinion, with so few marquee candidates in this hiring cycle, should have interest in Cignetti. If he says no to an initial overture, no harm, no foul.
But with the obvious Mendoza tie as the tie that would bind like no other tie would, two prominent NFL voices have now attempted to match the Raiders and Cignetti. Time will tell if he's even on the radar to replace Carroll, but it can't hurt to find out if he'd entertain making the jump to the NFL.
Davis has surely done worse when hiring head coaches.