The Raiders’ roster churn has reached the point where the hard part isn’t identifying change - it’s deciding who gets left behind.
After an eventful summer that started the day after the 2025 season ended, Las Vegas has overhauled just about everything in sight. The front office and coaching staff have spent months trying to clean up one of the league’s weakest collections of talent and one of its most troubled coaching setups from recent seasons. Now, with offseason work, training camp and the preseason in the books, Klint Kubiak and his staff are staring down the most difficult part of the job.
Kubiak didn’t pretend otherwise after the Raiders’ final preseason game.
“It's awful. You develop relationships with these guys since April and they give you their heart and their soul and all their time, and eventually it comes down to this,” Kubiak said the day after Las Vegas’ final preseason game.
He also pointed to the other side of that reality - the league’s endless supply of second chances.
“But there's also so many examples of guys that have been cut and make practice squads and make a team, or guys that get claimed by other teams, or guys that get cut five times and make 12-year careers."
"So, there's lots of examples that you can share with them to encourage them because there's a lot of good football players that are out there in the NFL that have been sliced and diced multiple times. Coaches too, hired and fired, and you just get better. You get better and you learn and you fail forward."
Some of the decisions ahead of Las Vegas are being driven less by performance than by simple math. The Raiders don’t have much flexibility at several spots, which means the cuts will come from a limited number of places. That narrows the field considerably.
Linebacker, cornerback, quarterback, running back, safety and, for now, wide receiver are all areas where the Raiders are short enough that they can’t really afford to slash aggressively. So the cuts are more likely to come from position groups where the team has excess bodies and fewer spots to justify carrying them.
One of the clearest examples is tight end. Las Vegas may have one of the deepest groups at the position in the entire NFL, and Brock Bowers sits at the top of it.
If he stays healthy, he’s arguably the best tight end in the league. Michael Mayer, meanwhile, could start for a huge chunk of the NFL.
The Raiders even listed six tight ends on their latest depth chart, and that makes the next move feel obvious: somebody from that room is probably going to be squeezed out. It won’t necessarily mean those players failed. It may simply mean there’s no practical reason to keep six tight ends on a 53-man roster.
Defensive line is another spot worth watching. Rob Leonard has a deep familiarity with the group after spending the past three seasons coaching the unit before moving up to defensive coordinator this offseason, and that background could give him the freedom to make tougher calls.
Still, the group hasn’t been untouched by circumstance. Keyron Crawford’s injury in Thursday’s preseason loss to the San Francisco 49ers, along with the Raiders parting ways with multiple defensive linemen earlier this offseason, could limit how aggressive they get there. Even so, it would not be a surprise if Las Vegas still moved on from a defensive lineman or two.
Up front on offense, the picture is clearer at the top and fuzzier everywhere else. The starting offensive line is basically locked in, and the past few months have been spent sorting out the reserve roles and figuring out who can handle which spot. Beyond the starters and a handful of reliable backups, very little is secure.
That uncertainty is part of a bigger long-term plan. The Raiders are expected to keep reshaping the offensive line over the next few seasons for No. 1 overall pick Fernando Mendoza. But every rebuild has a purge attached to it, and for Las Vegas, that means trimming away the players who no longer fit the plan.
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