The Mendoza Rebuild: How Las Vegas Plans To Climb Out Of The AFC West Basement

The Las Vegas Raiders opened the 2026 NFL Draft on April 23 by selecting Indiana quarterback and 2025 Heisman Trophy winner Fernando Mendoza with the No. 1 overall pick. The selection is the keystone of a rebuild that, on the depth chart, looks promising and, on the standings sheet, looks daunting. The Raiders finished 3-14 in 2025 — the worst record in the NFL, tied with the Jets, Titans, and Cardinals but holding the top pick on tiebreaker. They earned the right to draft Mendoza by being the league's least functional team, and they will spend him trying to escape the league's hardest division.

The path to the pick ran through a coaching change. Pete Carroll, hired to run the 2025 season, was fired after one year and a 3-14 finish; general manager John Spytek was retained, and Las Vegas hired Klint Kubiak as head coach to oversee the rebuild. The quarterback room was cleared in March, when the Raiders traded Geno Smith — who had absorbed a league-worst 55 sacks and thrown a league-high 17 interceptions in 2025 — to the New York Jets in a pick swap. That trade was the tell. Las Vegas was not patching the position. It was clearing it for whoever went No. 1.

Mendoza is the franchise's fifth drafted Heisman winner, and the organization handed him the keys with appropriate ceremony. "There's a lot of anticipation coming to this pick, but now I'm really glad that all of the outside noise is done," he said at his introductory press conference. "I'm officially a Raider. I'm excited to be humble and hungry and get to work." Kubiak's first message to him, by Mendoza's account, was "to stay humble and hungry and to keep on trying to learn every single day." Owner Mark Davis, who has held the No. 1 pick before, was blunter about the stakes: "Had that position before, and it didn't work out."

The supporting cast is the reason the bet is defensible. Mendoza walks into a backfield led by Ashton Jeanty, the 2025 rookie who led all first-year players in rushing, and a tight end room anchored by Brock Bowers, already one of the most productive young pass-catchers in football. On defense, Maxx Crosby remains the centerpiece after a near-trade to Baltimore fell through on a failed physical in March; he is recovering from offseason knee surgery. A rookie quarterback inheriting a featured back, an All-Pro-caliber tight end, and a star edge rusher is not starting from zero. He is starting from a roster with finished pieces and a hole at the most important position — which is precisely the hole a No. 1 pick is meant to fill.

The cap sheet gives Spytek room to keep building. The 2026 league-wide salary cap was set at $301.2 million, up roughly $22 million, and the Raiders entered the offseason with one of the larger war chests in football — estimates ranged from $87 million to north of $90 million in space. That is the kind of flexibility that lets a team add veteran offensive linemen to protect a rookie quarterback, the exact failure point that sank Geno Smith's 2025. The draft class leaned into the same logic: after Mendoza, Las Vegas spent Day 2 and Day 3 capital on a safety, an edge rusher, an interior lineman, and a pair of cornerbacks, addressing the trenches and secondary rather than chasing skill-position flash.

The obstacle is the address. The AFC West in 2025 was a gauntlet: the Denver Broncos finished 14-3 and won the division, the Los Angeles Chargers made the playoffs at 11-6, and even a down-year Kansas City Chiefs team at 6-11 finished ahead of the Raiders. Mendoza does not get a soft landing. He gets six divisional games a year against a dominant Denver club, a playoff-tested Chargers roster, and a Chiefs franchise that does not stay down for long. The rebuild's timeline is not set by Mendoza's development curve alone. It is set by how fast the rest of the division regresses, and there is no evidence yet that it will.

What Las Vegas is buying is optionality plus time. A rookie quarterback on a cost-controlled deal, a top-five back, a star tight end, a healthy cap, and a division that will eventually cycle downward the way every division does. The honest read on a 3-14 team that just drafted its quarterback is that 2026 is about establishing a floor and 2027 is about contention — if Mendoza hits. The Heisman and the national title say the evaluation is sound. The standings say the climb is steep. Both things are true, and the Raiders just committed the next three years to finding out which one matters more.