Brady's turbulent Vegas debut: Can he rescue the Raiders?

One of the strangest subplots of the NFL season reached peak strange Sunday afternoon.

Tom Brady, in his role as lead color commentator for Fox, was in Buffalo calling the marquee matchup between the Bills and Philadelphia Eagles. At the same time, the Las Vegas Raiders, the team Brady co-owns, was facing the New York Giants in the proverbial "Toilet Bowl" to determine the league's worst record.

As the Bills mounted a comeback attempt that ultimately fell just short, Brady provided insight on the play of Josh Allen and Jalen Hurts. He's much better at this stuff now compared to his rookie season in the booth, when he tended to simply narrate replays.

But as Brady showcased his sharpened football analysis, the product of his other NFL role, as a front-office executive, was busy imploding in Vegas.

The Raiders didn't just lose at home to the hapless Giants; they were comprehensively thumped, 34-10.

Geno Smith, the 35-year-old quarterback acquired by Vegas in a trade to lead the new-look team, threw two more interceptions to extend his NFL-worst total to 17. He was also sacked three more times Sunday, pushing him to 55 sacks on the year - tied for the most in the league.

The Smith deal, and the swift contract extension that followed, looks like one of the worst quarterback decisions this side of Deshaun Watson. Other than rookie Cam Ward on the hopeless Tennessee Titans, Smith has the worst QBR, which is saying something in a season that has included plenty of Justin Fields, Joe Flacco, and Jacoby Brissett. Even 44-year-old Philip Rivers, lured out of a five-year retirement, has posted a better QBR in Indianapolis than Smith in Vegas. This is grim stuff.

The Raiders are 2-14 after losing to a Giants team that fired its coach and seems likely to fire its general manager, and Vegas will get the first overall draft pick in April if it loses to Kansas City on Sunday. Raiders fans could be forgiven for fearing that Vegas will accidentally win that game, considering the Chiefs are a husk of their former selves and will start quarterback Chris Oladokun, a person whose existence was unknown to most football fans until a week ago.

The great unknown in Las Vegas is how much Brady has to do with any of this. He and business partner Tom Wagner bought a 10% stake in the Raiders from Mark Davis in 2024, and NFL insiders have frequently suggested that the seven-time Super Bowl champion dove into the ownership role.

Brady has reportedly been involved in all of the key decisions since taking an ownership stake: hiring 74-year-old Pete Carroll as head coach, bringing now-fired assistant Chip Kelly aboard to run the offense, appointing his former college teammate and ex-Tampa Bay executive John Spytek as general manager, and giving Smith a reported $75-million extension after trading for him. That's the same Vegas braintrust that selected running back Ashton Jeanty with the sixth overall pick in April. The former Boise State star has been fine but underwhelming, averaging 3.7 yards per carry and doing little to disprove the notion that taking a running back with a premium first-round pick is a reach.

And so, the scorecard for the first year of the new Raiders regime includes the league's worst record, a coach who looks desperately past his prime, a quarterback who might be even further past his expiration date, and an offense that's largely bereft of talent and has averaged a miserable 14.2 points per game. That is, not surprisingly, the lowest in the NFL.

Even their most obviously defensible move, giving a nine-figure contract to Maxx Crosby, is aging poorly amid an apparent dispute between the star pass-rusher and the team about shutting him down for the year.

Early in the season, legitimate questions arose about whether Brady could exploit an unfair advantage in his role with Fox, where he meets with coaches ahead of games, to gain inside knowledge that he could then pass along to Carroll and the Raiders. Given how things have gone on the field so far, you might be wondering if opposing coaches are offering him fake intel.

To anyone who isn't a fan of the Raiders, it's all quite funny. Brady, for all of his obvious football accomplishments, had zero experience in a front office and - this part seems significant - already had a high-profile job with Fox. Did Davis expect Brady's mere presence to be enough to turn around his woebegone franchise? In fairness, it's not like Davis had been doing a stellar job on his own, delivering two winning seasons and not a single playoff victory since taking over the team after his father, Al, died in 2011.

The question now becomes whether Brady sticks with any of his handpicked choices for another year. Smith is almost certainly gone. Carroll has said he expects to return, and firing him would be an admission of failure, but it's worth noting the Seattle Seahawks have rapidly improved in his absence. Do the Raiders hang on to Crosby, even if it makes little sense to have a highly paid and possibly disgruntled sack artist on a team that doesn't expect to win many games?

None of these have easy answers, especially for a part-time owner who's learning on the job. It's possible that, much like his broadcasting gig, Brady will improve at the executive role in his second season.

But then again, he couldn't do much worse.

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.