The Raiders' Defensive Rebuild Is Already Coming Apart

Three losing seasons in a row will sharpen your eye for what actually matters. After watching this team go 3–14 in 2025 — outscored by nearly a touchdown a game, unable to win two-thirds of the games that were actually close — I came into this offseason looking for one thing on the defensive side: evidence that the Raiders had found the veteran infrastructure to hold a young unit together while the young talent caught up. What I'm seeing instead is that infrastructure dissolving before the first real game snap.

Start with what was lost. Devin White departed to Detroit on August 1, and the number that follows him out the door matters: 174 tackles and 2.5 sacks across all 17 games last season. That is a linebacker who was on the field for everything, who anchored the middle of a defense that badly needed anchoring. You can replace a player. You cannot replace the institutional knowledge a veteran linebacker carries — the pre-snap reads, the communication to the safeties, the ability to make a younger room feel like it knows what it's doing. That is gone. Simultaneously, pass rusher Chris Collier landed on Injured Reserve, and cornerback Jermod McCoy — who missed all of 2025 with a knee injury and was cleared to begin training camp recovery in early July — is still listed as Questionable. Three defensive players, three different failure modes, all arriving at once.

I wrote last week about Rob Leonard's training camp philosophy: player-led accountability, internal ownership, the idea that a defense can find its identity through competition and self-governance rather than veteran hierarchy. I meant it as a narrow path worth watching. I want to be precise now about what breaks it. Player-led cultures work when there are enough experienced voices to model the standard. Right now, the linebacker depth chart runs through Buddy Johnson, Patrick Johnson, and Cameron McGrone — names still establishing themselves at this level. The cornerback room is similarly young, with McCoy's availability genuinely uncertain and the depth behind him untested. Isaiah Pola-Mao is a real piece — 92 tackles and 2 interceptions last season — and Maxx Crosby gives the front its identity. But between the edge and the secondary, there is a significant gap where veteran leadership used to live.

The close-game number from 2025 is the one that keeps pulling me back. Two wins in seven games decided by a touchdown or fewer. That 29% rate was not a product of bad luck or poor scheduling — it was the specific signature of a team that didn't know how to execute when the margin for error disappeared. Defensive execution in close games is not about talent alone; it is about communication, assignment discipline, and the kind of composure that comes from having done it before. The Raiders just subtracted the player most responsible for that composure in their linebacker room.

My read is this: the optimistic version of the 2026 Raiders defense still exists, but it now requires things to go right that were not required before August 1. Maxx Crosby has to be dominant enough to make the pass rush functional despite Collier's absence. McCoy has to get healthy and actually hold up through a full season for the first time. The young linebackers have to develop faster than the schedule will wait for. And Leonard's player-led model has to produce accountability in a room that no longer has a veteran center of gravity to rally around. None of those things are impossible. All of them have to happen together. That is a narrower path than this franchise can comfortably afford after back-to-back years of double-digit losses.