The decision is in. Las Vegas Raiders first-year head coach Antonio Pierce named veteran Gardner Minshew as the starting quarterback for the 2024 season on Sunday, according to Vincent Bonsignore of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Aidan O’Connell will back up Minshew on September 8 in the Raiders season opener which begins in a hostile environment on the road against Justin Herbert and the Los Angeles Chargers.
“A lot of things went into it,” Pierce said. “It wasn’t based off of [solely] last night. There’s a lot of factors. So, we feel like Gardner gives us the best opportunity to get off to a fast start, and that’s what we’re going with. We support him, our teams behind it, our staffs behind it, the organizations behind it.”
Vic Tafur of The Athletic stated that the decision came down to one thing, experience.
Minshew, who signed with the Raiders back in March, beat out incumbent starter O’Connell for the job after earning the first Pro Bowl selection of his career during his 2023 campaign for the Indianapolis Colts.
Appearing in all 17 games for the Colts, Minshew took over as starter in place of an injured Anthony Richardson, who was the fourth overall pick out of the University of Florida, in Week 6. He passed for 2,752 yards, 13 touchdowns, and nine interceptions through 12 starts as Indianapolis finished the season with a .500 record, 6-6.
Minshew went through a quarterback competition with O’Connell for the starting spot after the 2023 fourth-round pick beat out veteran Jimmy Garoppolo in last season’s quarterback battle.
Embed from Getty ImagesBoth signal callers got meaningful reps with the Raiders’ first-team offense in training camp.
The quarterback battle ended up going longer than anyone expected, past training camp and into the preseason, to the point that the first unofficial depth chart released by the team earlier this month penciled in both Minshew and O’Connell as QB1. Talk about head scratching.
What set Minshew apart is the fact that he is heading into his sixth NFL campaign, and his experience, as well as strong performances through two preseason games, helped convince the Raiders coaching staff to go in a different direction for the 2024 season.
After referring to Minshew as “a culture fit” in Las Vegas following his free agency signing, Pierce later described the veteran as a “savvy” quarterback during training camp.
“Gardner’s really savvy, does a good job of controlling [tempo], poise, feels things around him, good feeling in the pocket,” Pierce told reporters, according to ESPN’s Paul Gutierrez.
A 2019 sixth-round pick by the Jacksonville Jaguars out of Washington State, Minshew began his career as a starter in Jacksonville before spending three campaigns mostly backing up Trevor Lawrence, who was the No. 1 pick out of Clemson with the Jaguars and Jalen Hurts with the Philadelphia Eagles.
His ability to step up for Richardson and put together a Pro Bowl-caliber campaign in Indianapolis was enough to convince the Raiders to give Minshew another opportunity at starting. If he happens to struggles early in the season, however, Las Vegas could still decide to make a midseason switch to O’Connell for the second year in a row.
