As the Raiders reboot, it’s GM John Spytek — not Tom Brady or Mark Davis — who should be the focus
Spytek and his role was overshadowed by a Hall of Fame coach and a future Hall of Fame QB being portrayed as the franchise’s bellwethers. Now Spytek has his opportunity to take control of that narrative.
In late October, it was abundantly apparent that the wheels were coming off the Las Vegas Raiders.
The team had entered its bye week 2-5 following a gutting 31-0 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs, and word had begun to travel through NFL coaching and front-office circles that head coach Pete Carroll and offensive coordinator Chip Kelly were at odds. Kelly’s scheme and play-calling were not fitting with veteran quarterback Geno Smith and many of the roster’s surrounding pieces. Philosophical differences were festering inside the coaching staff. The offensive line — coached by Carroll’s son Brennan — was a disarray of injuries and failing positional experiments. And eight weeks into the season, league sources with ties to both Pete Carroll and Kelly were predicting a speedy breakup after the season. If not sooner.
It was a fascinating development to some in the NFL who were watching from afar and wondering how the Raiders were going to function with the added influence of new minority owner Tom Brady. After all, it was Kelly who pointed directly to Brady as being influential in his decision to join the Raiders, even when the union was seen as an oddity for those who knew Carroll. Not only did Kelly and Carroll lack a prior working relationship, they also historically leaned into different offensive styles and had very different personalities. They were suddenly melded together after the Raiders and Brady failed to land Ben Johnson as their next head coach.
Only two months in, it wasn’t working. And in the middle of it, the Raiders made a relatively innocuous move that ended up being a harbinger of a more fundamental problem: They signed Tyler Lockett,a 33-year old wideout who had been released by the Tennessee Titans, signaling a disjointed vision of what Las Vegas was trying to be.
On one hand, it was an addition that fit Carroll’s win-now mindset. On the other, it ran contrary to a wider vantage of general manager John Spytek, who had espoused beliefs of building, developing and actually playing the young talent that would grow into a long-term core.
To the outside world, the Raiders were 2-5 and sinking with problems inside their coaching staff. And now a 74-year-old Carroll was being placated with the addition of another familiar aging face from his Seattle Seahawks era.
It begged the questions: What exactly was the Raiders’ mission? Who precisely was spearheading it?
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As one longtime league executive familiar with Davis, Carroll and Brady framed it: The three fundamental people in the organization appeared to be on their own separate pages.
“Very different visions,” the source said. “I would imagine it’s going to be the same [Raiders] s***.”
By Jan. 5, it was.
Carroll was fired. And those mixed visions delivered the Raiders to a familiar — and potentially deeper — phase of rebooting the franchise. One that may include the trade of defensive end Maxx Crosby and some other veterans before the offseason construction dust settles. And one that will almost certainly include drafting a quarterback with the No. 1 pick in April’s draft.
Tom Brady’s involvement with the Raiders vs. GM John Spytek’s day-to-day approach
What it won’t resolve is what some across the league believe is a flawed design: Brady’s operational involvement from afar, rather than as a daily presence inside the building alongside Spytek and Davis. Instead, the franchise is selling change as a “close collaboration” between Spytek and Brady when it comes to the Las Vegas football operations and finding the team’s next head coach. That still won’t draw Brady into the traditional boots-on-the-ground presence of most other high-ranking NFL decision makers.
That statement from the Raiders does publicly draw Brady more into the team’s fold when it comes to bearing responsibility for decisions that come next. The Carroll failure? That won’t be pinned to Brady. Nor will the Kelly failure, despite Kelly himself pointing to Brady as the ownership element that drew him toward the Raiders. But the fate of this next hire will go on Brady’s résumé as an owner-executive. It will also amplify the accountability on Spytek and Brady. More than ever, they’re a tandem.
Yet only Spytek will be around every day, observing the rhythms of the building, overseeing the minute-to-minute grind, absorbing the granular details of what can be the difference between success and failure. That reality should force a recalibration of who is really being tapped to lead the Raiders to a revival. For a while, we’ve speculated that Brady would be that difference maker. The belief existed because Davis alluded to his addition as having that kind of gravity.
But there’s an argument to be made that Spytek will be the most important piece in all of this, especially once he begins working side-by-side with the head coach whom he and Brady have been charged with finding. Once that coach is in place, Spytek is the one who will have the most consistent contact with him. Not to mention working with Davis on a day-to-day basis. All while Brady’s bandwidth continues to be divided between his analyst job with Fox Sports and his family on the other side of the country in Miami.
Aside from the head coach, that will continue to make Spytek the public-facing executive in this rebuilding endeavor. As it did Monday when he held his season-ending news conference and addressed the firing of Carroll. His meeting with reporters produced some interesting moments, starting with Spytek putting the 3-14 season on his shoulders: “The accountability should start and stop with me. That needs to be said.”
Asked if Brady would be more of an on-site fixture in the building, Spytek sidestepped the question in a way that suggested that Brady won’t. But what was most interesting was hearing how Spytek described their relationship.
“I think people sometimes misunderstand mine and Tom’s relationship,” Spytek said. “We played together one year at Michigan and then we didn’t talk for 20 years. Then he came to [play in] Tampa [where Spytek was a personnel executive]. … We see football similar. We don’t see it the same. We have plenty of discussions and disagreements and I’m not afraid to tell him that. I think that’s kind of why he likes me. But I do believe that we see things similar and we’ve both had a lot of success seeing it that way.”
“I talk to him a lot,” Spytek added. “He’s aware of what we’re doing. I don’t bore him with the mundane transactions or all that. But any big decision I’ve talked to him about [it]. Any vision, I’ve talked to him about [it]. He’s a great resource for me. He’s a great partner in this for me. I would be not doing a good job and be a fool if I didn’t talk to him. He’s been supportive of me. He can’t be here every day right now, but I promise you I talk to him a lot and he and I are on the same page.”
Intended or not, that sounds more like Brady is still being used as a resource rather than sitting at the controls every day. It’s hard to know until we see where this goes now that the team has moved on from Carroll. Prior to that decision, Spytek and his role was overshadowed by a Hall of Fame coach and a future Hall of Fame quarterback being portrayed as the franchise’s bellwethers. Now Spytek has his opportunity to take control of that narrative. And he’s going to have to do it by showing what he learned from the first-year failure that cascaded over much of the roster.
Interestingly, he reiterated his previous notions of building and sustaining a team — which, again, seemed to be the goal when Brady and the Raiders targeted Ben Johnson before taking a left turn into Carroll’s “win now” mindset. And the next coach?
“We’re looking for someone to build this the right way and not think that we’ve got to produce 10 wins or whatever next [season],” Spytek said.
That would be something he learned in his first year as general manager — although it should be noted that Spytek wasn’t part of the Carroll decision. Spytek was hired only days before Carroll, who was ultimately the choice of Davis and Brady. Another thing Spytek appears to have learned from watching the Kelly situation go sideways? He wants the next head coach to name his staff.
“I want to turn that over to the coach,” Spytek said. “We’re going to have a lot of great conversations about who, why, where — there’s going to be a lot of great football conversations. But my belief has always been you give a lot of the responsibility to the head coach to hire the staff that he wants to hire.”
By design, this all sounds different than what happened one year ago. It also sounds more conventional and realistic when it comes to where the Raiders are sitting. They’re holding the No. 1 pick in the draft for a reason. This isn’t going to be a snap-your-fingers worst-to-first scenario like the New England Patriots or Chicago Bears this season. Instead, it looks more like an offseason of roster-churning that will move a lot of veterans out and seek to add more young pieces to lay the foundation.
The first real test of that is how Spytek handles the Crosby situation after putting the star defensive end on injured reserve (to Crosby’s highly-publicized dismay) to end the season. That played a part in the Raiders securing the No. 1 overall pick and opened the door to aligning the next head coach with the quarterback of their choice. It also preserved Crosby’s trade value by not exposing him to late-season injury risk. If the Raiders move on from Crosby, it will be a showcase of what Spytek can engineer when it comes to a sizable trade — which further elevates his importance when it comes to parsing out his role versus Brady’s.
“Winning is fun,” Spytek said. “But it comes at a price. And it is required every day.”
The same is true for Spytek and Brady. One of them will be in the building paying that price every day. And that’s who people should start focusing on.
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