Las Vegas Raiders 2026: The Coverage Report — 82 graded takes about one player, and 10 straight playoff picks that graded zero

Across every team in our database, Las Vegas sits at 663 tracked takes and 222 of them graded. That is 13th of 32 in raw volume and 17th of 32 in graded takes — the median club has 222 or 223 graded takes, so the Raiders are almost exactly the middle of the league. For scale, the Bills lead the board at 1,036 takes and 527 graded; the Falcons are last in volume at 347, and the Cardinals last in graded takes at 144.

One caveat that applies to all 32 of these posts: this measures the outlets MissedTakes tracks, not all of football media. A club can be covered heavily by its local press and still look thin here.

So the Raiders were not ignored. But the *shape* of the coverage is unusual. Of 222 graded Raiders takes, 126 are mock-draft picks, and 82 of them — more than a third of everything graded on this team — are about one player.

The Mendoza monoculture

Fernando Mendoza is the subject of 165 tracked Raiders takes, 82 graded, at 98.8 average accuracy and +39.4 average skill. He went first overall to Las Vegas in the 2026 draft, and the field saw it coming with near-unanimity.

That is the pundit record's best-scoring corner, and it is also its least interesting: a No. 1 pick that everyone agrees on is not a hard call. It shows up in the team's mock-draft numbers — 126 graded, 81.7 average accuracy, +39.3 average skill, easily the healthiest type line the Raiders have.

Worth noting how mocks are scored: the baseline is a shuffled mock, worth 50. That is why Jaime Eisner, the most prolific Raiders mock-drafter here with 21 graded picks, posts 42.7 average accuracy and still +43.1 skill — the individual picks miss, but the ordering holds up. His seven-round Raiders mock had Mendoza first and then five projections who went undrafted entirely.

The cutdown: eight grades, ten still open

Roster-spot calls are the series' news hook, and on the Raiders the file is small: 18 tracked calls, 8 graded, 10 still pending as of September 7.

Seven of the eight graded calls belong to one man. Hondo Carpenter went 7-for-7, all at 100 accuracy. His full site record is exactly that — 7 graded takes, all roster-spot, 100 accuracy, a 40.0 MissedTakes Score, and a *provisional* confidence flag, because seven takes is seven takes.

Six of those seven were players who were already on somebody's 53 last season, which is our naive baseline. Calling Kirk Cousins, Aidan O'Connell, Matt Gay, Malcolm Koonce, Patrick Johnson and Segun Olubi onto the roster scores 100 for accuracy and +0 for skill. Right, but not informative.

The exception is the one call that beat the baseline. On August 12, Carpenter wrote that fifth-round rookie corner Hezekiah Masses had already made it: *"he still thinks he is on the bubble and said he has his focus on making the 53-man roster. Hey, Hezekiah, you have."* Masses was not on a 53 last year, so the baseline said no. He made it. Accuracy 100, skill +200 — the only Raiders roster-spot call in our file that told you something the naive guess didn't.

The single graded miss came from the other direction. On August 27, Carter Bahns had Phillip Dorsett on a CBS Sports list of veterans headed back to the practice squad: *"Dorsett spent the 2025 season on the Raiders' practice squad and is likely destined for the same fate this year."* Dorsett made the 53. Accuracy 0, skill −200.

That is the whole graded cutdown record: one genuine surprise called correctly, one veteran cut call that went the wrong way, six freebies. Everything else is still open — three separate Carpenter calls on UDFA edge Cian Slone, plus Chase Roberts, E.J. Williams, Corey Rucker, Jacob Clark, Roman Hemby, and Michael David Smith on waived corner Decamerion Richardson. We'll grade them as the season resolves them.

One more Raiders-relevant call graded in the past week but sits outside our team filter: Evan Tarracciano's preseason "duds" column, which expected Mendoza to stay behind Cousins on the depth chart. Accuracy 0, skill −200.

The rest of the graded record

The pattern is blunt: everything that resolved on draft night graded well, and everything that required judgment about how good this team is graded badly.

• Playoff picks: 10 graded, 0.0 average accuracy, −190 average skill. Every single one wrong. Five of the 10 are Nick Wright, who was on the Raiders repeatedly at plus-340: *"I just like the value at plus three forty."* Rich Eisen had them twice, Simon Hunter as *"the perfect under the radar team that sneaks in there in that final seventh spot,"* and Jourdan Rodrigue and Chris Brockman once each.
• Season win totals: 10 graded, 16.0 average accuracy, −48 average skill. The field's nine 2025 calls on Las Vegas ranged from 6 to 9 wins — Brady Quinn 6, Danny Parkins 7, Aaron Schatz 8.3, Rich Eisen 9, Nick Wright five times between 7 and 9. The Raiders won 3. Our consensus board scores the collective miss at −4.5, one of the six largest in the league that season.
• Trade and signing calls: 11 graded, 9.1 average accuracy, −54.6 average skill. Three separate pundits — Daniel Jeremiah (*"I can't imagine a world where the Raiders wouldn't just outbid everybody"*), Tom Strachan and Pat Gustavson — sent Rashid Shaheed to Las Vegas. He didn't go. Two more sent Alec Pierce there. He didn't go either. The only 100 in the group is Nick Shook on the Raiders moving Jakobi Meyers.
• Depth chart calls: 236 tracked, 9 graded. The biggest tracked pile on this team is almost entirely ungraded. Too thin to say anything about.

Who has a named record here

Twelve pundits clear five graded Raiders takes. Only these are worth printing, and none of these samples is large enough to rank anybody:

The split runs along type lines, not talent lines. Eisner and Crabbs are mock-drafters. Brooks is 6-for-6 on Raiders draft picks. Wright and Eisen are the two who kept betting on the team's season, and the team went 3-14 in 2025 after 4-13 in 2024, with no playoff appearance since 2021.

Blunt version: on the Raiders, our tracked outlets were excellent at repeating what the draft board already told them and 0-for-10 at judging whether the football team was any good.