What is the Raiders Plan For Kirk Cousins?

The Las Vegas Raiders signed Kirk Cousins knowing the clock was already ticking on the job, and on The Rich Eisen Show the question was what exactly the veteran quarterback has been promised about the runway between now and the moment rookie Fernando Mendoza is deemed ready to play. The answer, according to a former NFL quarterback who has lived the same script, is that the honest version sounds a lot less generous than the public one.

"It is going to be a competition, and when they deem Fernando ready to play, he's going to play," the guest said. "But they don't want to have to play him right away if he's not that guy. That's what I hope he's been told." The guest, who came up through a similar handoff with the New York Giants when the franchise drafted Eli Manning, framed the developmental philosophy as a defense of the rookie rather than a knock on the veteran. "I'm a believer that you start young guys when they're ready. Don't force them into action before they're ready. Because we've seen too many guys that get swallowed up by this league because they're trying to survive and they haven't had a chance to grow and learn and be in a position to truly thrive at this level."

If Mendoza shows up in training camp with the system already inside his head, the guest said, that quarterback should start week one. The Raiders run Chip Kubiak's offense, a heavy play-action and naked bootleg scheme built on pure progressions, which the guest described as friendly to a rookie who can take a snap under center and turn his back to the defense. "It simplifies things down where you don't have to see the whole field. So that's not real hard as long as you can do the mechanics of it," he said. "I don't think it's something that Fernando can't do."

The more interesting layer is what Cousins is privately playing for. The guest said his own situation in New York was a controlled audition for the next starting job somewhere else, and he assumes Cousins is reading the same map. "I think you go in and go, okay, I know the system. I've played at this level. I'm going to be better than Fernando is, just like I was better than Eli was in that process. And so you're going to get as many games as you possibly can, hopefully a full season."

The approach the guest described was equal parts mentor and competitor, a posture that gives the rookie every tool while still trying to take his job. "I want to share everything I can with these young guys. I want to give them every tool to be able to be as successful as they can, and then I'm going to beat them out and I'm going to play," he said. "I would have to assume Kirk feels the same."