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Mike Washington Jr. carried the ball 25 times for the Raiders last Sunday. Ashton Jeanty got it twice. If you’re wondering how the sixth pick in the 2025 NFL Draft ended up on the short end of that deal, you have company.
Was it a one-game thing? Did Jeanty’s comments about the Jets during the week cost him carries against them? Or did Washington do enough in a win the Raiders badly needed to make this the new arrangement?
Klint Kubiak chalked it up to the way the game unfolded. Asked later whether he sees the split as a week-to-week proposition, the Raiders coach needed three words.
“I do. Yes.”
That leaves plenty of room for Washington, and it should. He gave the Raiders 83 yards on a day they snapped a four-game losing streak. He also needed 25 carries to get there. At 3.3 yards a pop, Washington played well enough to earn more work. He hardly played so well that the Raiders ought to kick Jeanty to the curb.
And before anyone with an itchy trigger finger declares Jeanty a bust and calls for the Raiders to move on, can we go back to what happened just before the season opener? Jeanty went down with an ankle injury that looked serious enough that teammates got on their knees to pray for him.
We’d be naive to assume that because Jeanty got back on the field, the ankle sprain stopped taking a toll. There’s healthy enough to walk, jump and cut. Then there’s NFL healthy, which, in Jeanty’s line of work, means planting that foot in the ground and exploding through a hole before a linebacker can close it. The difference might be a fraction of a second. For a running back who hung his hat on what he could do in that fraction of a second, it’s a pretty big deal.
Remember what convinced the Raiders to take him sixth overall in the first place. Every argument the analytics crowd makes about the bad business of drafting a running back that high applied to them, too. They did it anyway because Jeanty had the kind of burst that could turn a well-blocked 5-yard run into a problem for a safety 20 yards downfield.
How much of that burst does he have now? Only Jeanty knows how the ankle feels when he asks it for that extra gear. Allowing for the possibility that he’s still feeling the effects of the sprain seems reasonable enough. Especially for anyone ready to reach a verdict on the strength of two carries for 9 yards.
Besides, did anyone happen to catch what Jeanty did when Kirk Cousins threw him the ball? He contributed more than 60 receiving yards against the Jets, including a 45-yard gain that set up the Raiders for a touchdown. For a guy some fans are ready to send on his way, he had a pretty good hand in helping them win.
“I’ve been really good in the pass game, and Mike’s been good in the run game,” Jeanty said. “So, I think they just wanted to take advantage of what we’re good at.”
As for how he felt about getting two carries while Washington got 25?
“We won. It doesn’t matter how I feel about how many times I get the ball. Whatever it takes for the team to win, I just want to win,” he said. “That’s all.”
Kubiak has games to win, too. If he thinks Washington gives him the best chance to do that on a particular Sunday, he owes it to the other guys in the locker room to hand him the ball. He also owes it to the Raiders to develop Jeanty, and he sounded pretty clear about where he stands on that.
“Ashton is still going to be a big part of our team,” Kubiak said postgame. “He’s going to be a huge part of our run game going forward.”
You can call Kubiak plenty of things. Irrational and impractical would be a tough sell. He saw what Washington could give him Sunday. He also saw what happened when Jeanty got the ball in space. Chances are his patience with Jeanty will pay off. On that 45-yard catch, it already did.
