The Raiders’ Week 8 plan against the Jets said plenty about where Ashton Jeanty stands right now.
Las Vegas barely used the No. 6 overall pick in the game, with rookie Mike Washington Jr. getting the start and handling the bulk of the work. Jeanty didn’t log a carry until the second quarter, and by the end of the day Washington had 25 carries to Jeanty’s two. Washington also played more snaps, 38 to 25.
That came after Jeanty had already put himself in the spotlight by criticizing how willing some Jets defenders were to tackle. But when game day arrived, Klint Kubiak didn’t give him much of a chance to answer for it. Kubiak also said Jeanty wasn’t being punished for his comments about the New York defense.
Jeanty, for his part, handled the reduced role without making a scene. He said the move toward Washington Jr. had been communicated to him beforehand.
The bigger issue is that Jeanty’s season has been hard to judge from the start. He has been dealing with an ankle injury since August, and he has since added a foot issue on top of that. With his explosiveness limited, and with the Raiders’ run blocking already shaky, it has been difficult to get a clean read on what he’s actually been able to do.
Still, the Week 8 usage only sharpened the debate around the pick itself. Las Vegas used the No. 6 overall selection on a running back in April, and that decision already looked questionable in a draft class that was deep at the position. The Raiders were also coming off a reset at general manager and head coach, which made roster-building even more important.
The players taken right after Jeanty - offensive tackle Armand Membou and wide receiver Tetairoa McMillan - would look useful in Silver and Black right now. Meanwhile, backs such as Bhaysul Tuten, Cam Skattebo and Woody Marks were still available until the fourth round.
And that’s the part that keeps hanging over Jeanty’s slow start: when other backs have gotten comparable chances, he hasn’t clearly separated himself enough to justify the draft gap. That doesn’t mean his career is headed off a cliff. It does mean the Raiders’ choice at No. 6 is looking more and more like one they may come to regret.
There’s also the larger organizational backdrop. Pete Carroll was hired as head coach with little or no input from John Spytek, and Spytek has made it clear he and Klint Kubiak are aligned in a way that suggests he and Carroll were not. Carroll’s own comments since being fired have pointed blame at Spytek for the way the roster was constructed, including the position Geno Smith was put in last season.
Spytek’s job is to build something that can win now and keep winning. Carroll, with his résumé and age, arrived in Las Vegas with a win-now mindset. But the roster didn’t really match that mission, and a head coach in that mode is the kind of person who would see a workhorse back as the answer to a struggling ground game.
That’s why the Jeanty pick drew skepticism immediately, and why Week 8 felt like such a rough checkpoint. Ryan Paganetti, who has been doing strong work on social media this season after serving as a Head Coach Research Specialist for the Raiders under Carroll, has said he’ll reveal who was responsible for the Jeanty decision once Las Vegas is eliminated this year.
For now, the two-carry game stands as the low point of the conversation. It doesn’t make Jeanty a bust. But it does make the Raiders’ decision to take him sixth overall look more and more like the wrong one.
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