Klint Kubiak did not make anyone wait through a preamble on Wednesday. Kirk Cousins is the Raiders' starting quarterback for the opener against Miami on Sept. 13, and Fernando Mendoza, the first pick in April's draft, will watch it from the sideline.
"Kirk's had a really good offseason, very good camp and he's earned it," Kubiak said. He added that he was happy with all three of his quarterbacks, which is the kind of thing a coach says when the decision was made a while ago and the announcement is a formality. Cousins took the first-team reps from the opening day of training camp and kept the majority of them through August.
What Cousins showed
The preseason sample was small and clean. Cousins played two of the three games, sat out the trip to Houston, and finished 13 of 17 for 101 yards and a touchdown. The touchdown came on his first drive as a Raider, a 13-yard throw to Michael Mayer against Arizona that finished a 5-for-6 series. Against San Francisco he went 8 of 11 for 51 yards across two possessions. Nothing spectacular and nothing wasted, which is the version of Cousins that coaches have been paying for since 2015.
Kubiak knows that version better than most. He was Cousins' quarterbacks coach in Minnesota in 2019 and 2020 and his offensive coordinator in 2021. Over those three seasons Cousins threw for 12,089 yards and 94 touchdowns, and the last of them, 4,221 yards and 33 scores against seven interceptions, sent him to the Pro Bowl with a 103.1 passer rating. When Kubiak said at the league meeting in March that he wanted to add a veteran quarterback, the veteran he had in mind had a name. Two days later Cousins agreed to terms.
Fourteen seasons, three franchises
Cousins is 38, the same age as his head coach, and has been outlasting expectations since Washington drafted him in the fourth round in 2012, 100 picks after the same team took Robert Griffin III second overall. He played three games as a rookie and threw 48 passes. By 2015 he was playing every game, and in 2018 he moved to Minnesota, where the Pro Bowls came: four in all across the two teams.
A torn Achilles ended his 2023 season in October, and he still landed a four-year, $180 million deal in Atlanta the following March. That is where the story got complicated. The Falcons benched him for Michael Penix Jr. in Week 16 of 2024, after 14 starts with 18 touchdowns and 16 interceptions. He opened 2025 as the backup, took over when Penix tore his ACL in Week 11, and went 5-3 the rest of the way with 1,721 yards, 10 touchdowns, five interceptions and four straight wins to close the year. Atlanta released him on March 11, the first day of the new league year. Three weeks later he signed in Las Vegas: $20 million guaranteed for 2026, with a club option for the two seasons after that.
The career line through 14 seasons reads 174 games, 44,700 yards, 298 touchdowns and 131 interceptions, on 66.7 percent completions and a 96.8 rating. That is a quarterback teams keep wanting to start, and this week another one did.
Why the wait is good for Mendoza
Now the part Raiders fans will argue about. Mendoza arrived with about every award a college quarterback can win. He took the Heisman, the Walter Camp, the Maxwell and the Davey O'Brien after leading an unbeaten Indiana team to the national championship, completing 72 percent of his passes for 3,535 yards and 41 touchdowns in his one season in Bloomington after three years at Cal. He is 22, 6-foot-5 and 225 pounds, and the Raiders spent the first overall pick on him. Nobody does that to build a backup.
His preseason was a rookie's preseason. Across three games he went 18 of 31 for 181 yards, one touchdown and one interception that went back for a score; against San Francisco he was 7 of 14 for 57 yards with the pick. That is a rookie's August, and it is why the plan Kubiak described in March still holds.
At the league meeting on March 31, before Cousins had signed, Kubiak was asked about developing a rookie quarterback. "I think in a perfect world, he's watching a mature adult go and run an offense and run the team," he said. "Sometimes they have to play from Day 1. It's our job as a coach to get them ready to go. I think it does help the player, though, if they can sit behind a mature adult and watch how they run the show."
Cousins has been on the other side of this. In 2012 he was the fourth-round rookie in a quarterback room built around Griffin, and he has started for three franchises since. Mendoza gets a starter who ran Kubiak's system in Minnesota, in a building where the coach has already said out loud that the rookie's job is to learn first. General manager John Spytek put it the same way on Wednesday: "His time is coming, but he's got to earn it every day, and he knows that."
The last No. 1 pick to open his rookie year on the bench was Baker Mayfield in 2018, and he was starting by Week 4. Mendoza will not be idle while he waits. Kubiak has been giving him first-team snaps on Cousins' rest days, and his line on those reps was that "live reps are the best medicine." Before the draft, Mendoza called himself a huge fan of Kubiak's work with Sam Darnold. He is now learning that offence from the man who built it and the quarterback who ran it.
The fantasy read
Cousins is the Raiders quarterback to roster in Week 1 and probably well beyond it, with Brock Bowers and Ashton Jeanty giving him more to work with than most 3-14 teams carry into a new season. Mendoza is a stash in dynasty and a watch in redraft. And if the Raiders are right about both of them, the day Mendoza takes over will come because he is ready, not because the man ahead of him failed.