The Las Vegas Raiders have drafted slightly better than the league average for eleven years. They have five of those picks left on the 2025 roster. From 2012 through 2022 the franchise turned 53 of 88 selections into 500-snap NFL contributors, a 60.2 percent hit rate against a league baseline of 57.3 percent. The math says the Raiders draft fine. The roster says they keep almost nothing. The gap is what this piece is about.
The popular case file on the Raiders is dysfunction. Three head coaches and three general managers cycled out between December 2018 and January 2024. An owner who has worked through Reggie McKenzie, Mike Mayock, Dave Ziegler, and Tom Telesco across that stretch. A head coach (Jon Gruden) who resigned mid-2021 over leaked emails and a head coach (Josh McDaniels) fired in October 2023 alongside his GM. A franchise quarterback (Derek Carr) drafted in 2014 and released after the 2022 season. The narrative on the franchise has been that the Raiders cannot execute, cannot keep an identity, cannot finish anything they start. The drafting record, taken in isolation, complicates that story. The retention record confirms it.
This is the inverse of the build-and-keep pattern the Eagles have run for fifteen years. Philadelphia produced 25 cohort hits from 2017 through 2021 and kept 8 of them on the 2025 roster, a 32 percent retention rate that ranks third in the league. Las Vegas produced the same number of cohort hits over that window, 25, and kept 3, a 12 percent rate that is the lowest in the series. Two franchises with comparable drafting rates produced rosters that look nothing alike. The difference is not picks. The difference is who picked them, and whether the person who picked them was still in the building three years later.
The McKenzie record
Reggie McKenzie ran the Raiders’ draft from 2012 through 2018: seven complete classes, 59 picks, 34 hits. The 57.6 percent rate is in line with the league baseline for the window. His pattern was steady. Every first-round selection McKenzie made between 2013 and 2018 produced a 500-snap NFL season. Six first-round picks, six hits, no first-round bust on his ledger. The 2014 second-round pick at 36 was Derek Carr, a 12-season NFL quarterback with 10,669 career snaps across 169 career games. The franchise pick of the McKenzie era stayed on the roster through three head coaches before Ziegler released him after the 2022 season.
The McKenzie years did not win football games. The teams went 4-12, 3-13, 7-9, 12-4, 6-10, and 4-12 across his last six seasons. Mark Davis fired him in December 2018 with one year left on his contract. The bulk math on his drafting was league-average. The teams were not.
What remains of McKenzie’s 59 picks is one player. Kolton Miller, the 2018 first-round left tackle out of UCLA at pick 15, is the lone McKenzie-era selection on the 2025 active roster. The other 58 are gone: traded, released, walked in free agency, retired, or cut at second-contract decision points by the GMs who followed. The 2018 class itself produced five 500-snap hits, four of whom are no longer in the building. Miller is the franchise’s only living connection to the regime that ran the team for the seven years before the current run of churn began.
Mayock drafted at 74 percent and got fired
Mike Mayock took the GM chair in January 2019 after a long career as the NFL Network’s draft analyst. Three classes later he was gone. The drafting record across those three years is one of the best three-year runs in the dataset.
Across 2019, 2020, and 2021, the Raiders drafted 23 players. Seventeen produced 500-snap NFL seasons, a 73.9 percent hit rate against a league rate of roughly 57.2 percent across the same window. That is a 16.7 percentage point lift. Inside those three years sits the 2019 class, which hit on 8 of 9 selections for an 88.9 percent rate against a league baseline of 58.3 percent that season. A 30.6 percentage point gap. The 2019 Raiders class is one of the best single classes in the eleven-year window.
The 2019 draft also produced Maxx Crosby. Fourth round, pick 106, defensive end out of Eastern Michigan. Crosby has now played seven NFL seasons, 6,992 career snaps, with a 1,186-snap peak season. He is the franchise cornerstone, and he came from the round Las Vegas drafted worst: a 43.8 percent fourth-round hit rate (7 of 16) from 2012 through 2022, against 62.0 percent league-wide. Crosby alone is the kind of draft outcome that defines a GM’s tenure.
The complication sits two rounds higher in the same draft. Clelin Ferrell went fourth overall to the Raiders out of Clemson, a top-five pick widely panned at the time as a reach. By the 500-snap metric this was a hit: Ferrell played 3,452 career snaps over seven seasons. By any other measure the league recognized, this was a bust. He made four career starts in seven seasons. The metric counted him as a 500-snap contributor because he played enough rotational snaps to clear the bar; the Raiders did not extend him after his rookie deal, and he has bounced around the league as a depth piece. This is the canonical case where a 500-snap “hit” is too generous to capture what the pick actually delivered. Hit, in this column, means a single season of 500 or more NFL snaps, the canonical 53 Report threshold documented at /methodology. The Mayock 2019 first round looks like a 3-for-3 outcome on the spreadsheet. On the field, the only one of the three who turned into a player the franchise wanted to keep was a fourth-round pick from the same class.
Mayock was fired after the 2021 season. The 2021 team went 10-7, made the playoffs, and lost the wild-card game to the Bengals. The firing was not about results, or at least not only about results. It was about the cluster of in-season events: the Henry Ruggs III incident in November 2021, the trade-deadline noise, and the Jon Gruden resignation in October over leaked emails. Mayock was packaged out with the regime that had hired him. Two of his 23 picks remain Raiders today: Crosby, and Malcolm Koonce, the 2021 third-round defensive end at pick 79. The other 15 hits, including the 2019 class that drafted so well, are no longer in Las Vegas.
Ziegler’s nine months
Dave Ziegler arrived from New England in January 2022 with Josh McDaniels as head coach. His complete-data draft contribution is the 2022 class: six selections, two hits. A 33.3 percent rate against a league baseline of 58.4 percent that year, tied with the 2017 class for the lowest single-class rate of the 2012-2022 window. On raw hits the 2022 class is the lowest at 2, against the 3 that 2017 produced. The 2023 draft falls inside the developmental window and is excluded from the 500-snap measurement.
Both 2022 hits remain on the 2025 roster. Dylan Parham, the third-round guard out of Memphis at pick 90. Zamir White, the fourth-round running back out of Georgia at pick 122. Two starters, both retained, both useful. They are also the entirety of the Ziegler draft footprint that survives. The 2023 class is partial, but the names from it that are still in the building (Tyree Wilson, Michael Mayer, Tre Tucker, Aidan O’Connell) sit outside the hit-rate measurement window. They count toward the roster math, not the drafting record.
The Ziegler-era release that defined the regime was not a draft pick. It was Derek Carr. The franchise quarterback the Raiders had drafted in 2014 and started since his rookie year was released in February 2023, a move that began the run of trades and free-agent acquisitions the team has used to fill the position since. The current starting quarterback is Geno Smith, originally drafted by the New York Jets in the second round of 2013 at pick 39 and acquired by the Raiders before the 2025 season as a 35-year-old veteran. The homegrown depth chart at the position has been Aidan O’Connell since 2023, a fourth-round pick at 135.
Ziegler was fired in October 2023, halfway through his second season. The team was struggling, the 2022 and 2023 drafts had not produced the immediate impact the regime had been hired to deliver, and the McDaniels coaching hire that came with the package was fired the same week. The retention figure that this section contributes to the franchise total is two: Parham and White. Two of the six 2022 picks, on the roster three years later, with a second-contract decision still ahead of them.
What survived
Five players from 88 picks across eleven years. The full list of Raiders draft selections from 2012 through 2022 still on the 2025 active roster: Kolton Miller (McKenzie 2018), Maxx Crosby and Malcolm Koonce (Mayock 2019 and 2021), Dylan Parham and Zamir White (Ziegler 2022). Measured against every pick the franchise made across the window, that retention rate is 5.7 percent.
On the series-standard measure, the share of a GM’s cohort hits still on the roster, the Raiders kept 3 of their 25 hits from 2017 through 2021, a 12 percent rate. The Eagles kept 8 of 25 over the same window, a 32 percent rate that ranks third in the league. The Bills, the league leader, kept 13 of 24 at 54.2 percent. Most franchises in the series sit somewhere between 20 and 40 percent on that measurement. The Raiders are the lowest, less than half the league norm, and the gap is the headline number this piece is built on.
The current Raiders roster has 25 drafted-by-team players on it. Twenty of those 25 came from the 2023, 2024, and 2025 drafts. The team is essentially built from three consecutive classes by three different decision-makers: Ziegler’s 2023, Telesco’s 2024, and Telesco’s 2025. Brock Bowers, the 2024 first-round tight end at pick 13. Ashton Jeanty, the 2025 first-round running back at pick 6. Jackson Powers-Johnson, the 2024 second-round center at pick 44. Jack Bech, the 2025 second-round receiver at pick 58. The first-round capital is being spent on skill positions and the trenches. The starting quarterback is being rented.
This is what a roster looks like when three GMs in a row do not get to develop a cohort to the second-contract decision. McKenzie’s picks aged out under Mayock. Mayock’s picks were cycled out under Ziegler. Ziegler’s picks are being graded by Telesco. Every new regime arrives with a roster the prior regime built, and every new regime is incentivized to remake the roster in its own image. Five players have survived the chain of those incentives.
What the metric papers over
The strongest case against this reading is that the 500-snap threshold gives credit where, in some cases, the league does not. The Clelin Ferrell example is the most legible: a top-five pick who played four career starts in seven seasons counts as a “hit” in the same column as Maxx Crosby, who has been one of the league’s premier pass rushers for the entirety of his career. Both go in the 17-of-23 numerator for the Mayock years. The 73.9 percent hit rate is what it is, and it is also generous to Ferrell in a way that flattens what GMs are usually graded on. A stricter threshold (say, 500 snaps in three separate seasons, or a starter-snap requirement) would split Ferrell and Crosby into different columns and compress Mayock’s rate downward.
The threshold critique inflates the drafting rate. It does not change the retention rate. If the bar is moved higher, the gap between drafting and retention compresses, not widens. The headline reading (drafting fine, retention essentially zero) holds at any reasonable threshold.
The structural critique is harder. Retention is not a clean GM-quality signal when three regime changes intervene. The Raiders’ 5.7 percent figure is partly a story about three firings rather than three GMs. Mayock did not get to make the second-contract decisions on his 2019 class. The new GM did, with different priorities. Penalizing a GM for picks his successor cut is a category error, in the same way that praising a GM for picks his predecessor made would be. A franchise that has churned three GMs in five years will read low on retention regardless of the quality of any individual class. The cleanest version of this critique is that retention is a franchise-stability metric as much as a GM-quality one, and the Raiders are being graded on both at once.
One last consideration: a single Crosby may be worth more than five mid-tier holdovers elsewhere. Crosby is the kind of player whose presence shapes a defense for a decade, and the Eagles’ eight cohort retentions, valuable as they are, do not all match his functional impact at the position. The retention metric weights all retained picks equally. One Crosby is not the same as four rotational players elsewhere. The franchise’s actual asset base in the homegrown column is more concentrated than the count suggests.
These caveats do not change the headline reading. They do change what to do with it. The 5.7 percent figure tells a clear story about the consequences of regime churn, which is the question the Raiders’ next decade actually has to answer.
What this leaves Telesco
Tom Telesco inherits a franchise where drafting has been the easier part. The 60.2 percent hit rate over eleven years says the Raiders have not had a picks problem since Reggie McKenzie took over in 2012. The 5.7 percent retention rate says the picks problem has been a different problem all along: the front office has not been stable enough to compound any one drafting regime’s hits into a roster.
Telesco has two classes in the building, 2024 and 2025. Both are excluded from the hit-rate window because they are still developing under the three-year rule. The bet the franchise has made is on first-round skill-position weapons (Bowers, Jeanty) and a free-agent veteran quarterback (Smith) bridging to whatever comes next. None of that is a draft-strategy question. All of it depends on Telesco being in the building in 2028 to grade what he picked in 2024 and 2025.
The metric on the Raiders’ next decade will not be hit rate. The franchise has solved hit rate. The metric will be whether the GM who drafted the 2024 class is the same person making the 2028 second-contract decisions on it. Five of 88 is what happens when that question keeps getting answered the other way.