The Las Vegas Raiders’ first 53-man roster of the John Spytek era says plenty about the direction of the team, and one thing it says loudly is this: the undrafted free agent pipeline still needs work.
Spytek has clearly put his stamp on the roster, building around youth and trying to line up the Raiders’ present with the shared vision he has with Klint Kubiak. That part of the plan is obvious. The draft has become a priority, and the team has also shown a willingness to bring in younger free agents who can contribute now and still be around when the turnaround comes.
But the UDFA side of the operation has not matched the rest of the work.
When Las Vegas unveiled its initial 53-man roster earlier this week, none of its undrafted free agents made the cut. That stands out because 45 UDFAs landed on 25 NFL rosters this fall. In other words, plenty of teams found a way to squeeze value out of that part of the market.
The Raiders did not.
Las Vegas signed 17 undrafted free agents in April, and only five are currently on the practice squad. Two rookie minicamp invitees also made that group, but the other 10 have already been moved on from after only a few months with the team. That’s a rough hit rate no matter how you slice it.
Even the names that came with the most attention didn’t change the outcome. Two of the team’s highest-paid players in the group got hurt, but neither Cian Slone nor Roman Hemby cracked the active roster. Slone at least had a case; Hemby did not.
And this wasn’t just a one-off problem. The Raiders went through a similar stretch last year, bringing in 15 undrafted free agents in their April 2025 class and watching all of them miss the 53-man roster. Only five reached the practice squad, and just three are still in the building more than a year later: Greedy Vance Jr., Jahfari Harvey and Carter Runyon.
The bigger concern is what happened to some of the others. Several of the UDFAs the team invested in are not even hanging around on practice squads elsewhere.
Some are in the UFL. Some are already out of pro football.
That’s the one area where Spytek still has room to grow.
It’s not as simple as saying the Raiders haven’t tried. They have.
They’ve been active, and they’ve even moved quickly on players; in a conversation with Jah Joyner last year, it was learned that Las Vegas called him before the draft was over to talk about a UDFA deal. So this is not a case of the team sitting on its hands.
It also doesn’t look like a money problem. The Raiders have an ownership group with cash to spend, and they have not been stingy with guarantees when they’ve chased players like Joyner, Slone, Hemby and others.
So the issue is somewhere else, and that’s for the Raiders’ scouts and executives to sort through. The encouraging part is that the draft classes under Spytek have shown real promise, both for this season and for the future. The discouraging part is that the same magic hasn’t carried over to the undrafted market.
That gap is hard to ignore. And right now, it’s the clearest blemish on Spytek’s résumé in Las Vegas.
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