Not long after reports of extension talks surfaced, Maxx Crosby will see a big raise. The Raiders locked down their Pro Bowl pass rusher Friday, Tom Pelissero and Ian Rapoport of NFL.com report (on Twitter). The Raiders announced the extension agreement.
Crosby agreed to a four-year, $98.98MM extension; the deal includes $53MM guaranteed. This is a considerable development for a player who entered the NFL as a Day 3 pick from a mid-major program.
This contract bumps Crosby into the upper echelon of edge rushers. At nearly $25MM annually, the former fourth-round pick is now the league’s fourth-highest-paid defensive player. Crosby’s deal tops Aaron Donald‘s, with only T.J. Watt, Joey Bosa and Myles Garrett‘s contracts coming in ahead of his.
This is obviously a major commitment from the Raiders, who saw Crosby quickly usurp draft classmate Clelin Ferrell as their cornerstone defensive lineman. An Eastern Michigan product, Crosby is just 24 and already has 25 sacks on his resume. He played a big part of Las Vegas clinching a playoff berth in Week 18, dominating against the Chargers to cement the team’s first postseason appearance in five years.
Crosby’s extension agreement ties him to the Raiders through the 2026 season. The Raiders are transitioning to a new regime, with Patrick Graham set to take over the defense. Friday’s contract terms certainly illustrate the Dave Ziegler–Josh McDaniels duo’s faith in Crosby, acquired in Jon Gruden‘s second draft running the Raiders. The team still has Yannick Ngakoue under contract for one more season, while Ferrell and Carl Nassib are also signed through 2022.
Glad to see them lock Maxx down. He is one of the players that make our recent bizarre draft approach more palatable as Raiders fans.
Getting Crosby and Renfrow in the middle rounds of one draft is such a windfall. Imagine if they hadn’t spent their three first round picks on a wild overreach, a running back, and a box safety.
I can live with Jacobs and Abram honestly. Teams have and will continue to do much worse than that in the first round. I am not even upset with them taking Ruggs, but obviously it is upsetting what he did and how that ended. Ferrell, Arnette and possibly Leatherwood are another story though. I’m not upset that they drafted those players, it’s where they drafted them that is the issue. No draft maneuvering awareness whatsoever on most likely Gruden’s part. When you’re always trying to be the smartest guy in the room and being cute you’re going to look foolish. Let’s hope that Ziegler/McDaniels have a better approach this April.
Absolutely. If you like a huge consensus reach that much, trade down.
That’s what got me. Just picking those three guys so far ahead of their projections. Was there never a thought given to trading back 5 spaces and hoping that they would still be available?
Or worse, if you saw the draft, they were high-fiving and jumping for joy when they drafted Leatherwood. There was virtually no chance that he was going any earlier. Very amateurish.
Please don’t remind me. I still stand firm that we won the Mack trade only to ruin it with what we did with the picks.
We didn’t do poorly on the Mack trade. Yes he is a fantastic LB but he was never going to win the Raiders a championship on his own. His salary was obviously a road block to having a balanced roster and at the time it was the right move to try and obtain value for him. Here we are 4 seasons later and the Bears are proving that they are the ones that lost that trade with nothing to show for his time in Chicago.
I mean, if they had drafted someone other than Trubisky, they likely would have.
So it’s this year plus 4 more? I wonder if they can eat some of the money this year in the form of a large signing bonus to decrease the cap hit in the future