Ashton Jeanty was universally praised as a pick when the Las Vegas Raiders selected him with the 6th overall pick in 2025. It was a move made with foresight, understanding that it wasn’t the team’s year to land a quarterback — instead deciding to fix their running game first, knowing the passer would come.

Midway into Jeanty’s second season, he’s become an afterthought of the offense. This was most pronounced on Sunday against the Jets when Jeanty recorded just two carries for nine yards, in a game when the Raiders ran the ball 28 times. The precipitous fall in Jeanty’s usage is being waved off by the coaching staff, but the devil is in the details: After running the ball 23 times in the season opener, Jeanty has gotten fewer and fewer carries each game. By October 11 he was down to 10 carries, then eight against the Rams, then Sunday.

Taking his spot in the offense has been Mike Washington Jr, who the Raiders took with a 4th round pick in 2026. It’s becoming clear that Washington is head coach Klint Kubiak’s favored running back of the two, increasing his usage rate before giving him the lion’s share of the carries against the Jets. Washington has a more defined role inside the Raiders offense as a bigger, bruising, short-yardage back who Kubiak is using to punctuate his passing offense. Meanwhile Jeanty is a three-down back now stuck in an offense that doesn’t really want or need him. Kubiak clearly selected “his guy” in the draft, and now Jeanty is already feeling like a vestige of a bygone era.

Of course, a helping of the blame belongs to Jeanty himself. Since arriving in the NFL he has struggled to make any appreciable impact, averaging a paltry 3.5 yards per carry, only scoring six career touchdowns, and only boasting a successful run on 42% of his carries. It’s been easy to blame the woeful Raiders’ offensive line, but there’s also a reality here that Jeanty just isn’t able to create for himself from the backfield, make people miss, or bowl people over — averaging just 1.9 yards after contact since arriving in the NFL, and even worse is his yard before contact which sits at 1.5 yards. That is the truly staggering number, because it shows that Jeanty isn’t nearly as explosive as he was in college.

The Raiders sit at an impasse. Kubiak is an offensive coach who has never really shown a penchant for running the football. He deviated from his plan for one season in Seattle when the team won the Super Bowl, but outside of that his teams have ranked in the bottom third of the NFL in carries across his other three seasons as an offensive coordinator. It’s clear that Las Vegas doesn’t really have a use case for Jeanty at this point, and perhaps the best move at this point would be to accept that keeping him is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, and move on.

As it stands we have several contenders in dire need of a running back, all of whom might believe they could be the ones to revitalize Jeanty’s career or had him highly graded in 2025, but fell short. A team like the Vikings makes a ton of sense, as would New England, or even Jacksonville — all of whom need help at running back and are positioned to make a playoff run. The question is whether or not the Raiders feel ready to pull off that Band-Aid yet, or more aptly — are they prepared for the fallout from making such a move?

Two things are clear: Jeanty is not playing good football, and the Raiders appear to have moved on.