Kirk Cousins grabbed Maxx Crosby by the collar on Friday.
Klint Kubiak sat both of them down for Saturday’s practice.
And in between those two things, Yahoo Sports dropped its preseason power rankings and slotted the Raiders 27th out of 32 teams. Not a great 48 hours for a franchise that spent all offseason insisting it was done being a punchline.
The actual sequence is pretty tame once you strip out the panic. Crosby beat his blocker and tipped a pass meant for Malik Benson. Cousins didn’t love the celebration that followed. He grabbed Crosby’s collar. Voices got loud. Nobody threw a punch, teammates split it up fast, and both guys were benched from drills the next morning as punishment.
Kubiak’s response was about as chill as it gets.
“Those are two leaders of our team going at it, so that is part of camp,” he told reporters.
Which is a fine thing to say. It’s also the kind of quote a coach gives when he needs the story to be over by Monday.
What matters more than the shoving match is who took first-team reps the next day. Fernando Mendoza got the ones Saturday and threw three touchdowns in red zone work, the same day Cousins stood on the sideline in a baseball cap. That’s not much on its own. Paired with Cousins losing the ones for even one day of discipline, it’s the first real evidence Kubiak’s “open competition” talk from three weeks ago wasn’t just contract-year theater. Cousins is holding a $20 million guarantee and a job a rookie is now visibly threatening to take, and if you want the receipts on how we got here, our previous breakdown of that guarantee is worth a re-read.
Then there’s the rankings.
Yahoo Sports’ Frank Schwab has the Raiders at 27, writing that the franchise “clearly tanked late in the season to get the top pick” and is now hoping Mendoza’s Indiana magic rubs off on an organization that doesn’t remember what winning looks like. ESPN’s Football Power Index has them at 28, projecting 5.5 wins. Vegas is favored in three games all season. Zero primetime games on the schedule, the first time that’s happened to a No. 1 overall pick’s team in two decades.
None of that is destiny. It’s a bunch of national writers who haven’t watched a single snap of live football looking at a scuffle and a rookie QB and deciding they already know how this ends.
Adam Schefter had the news first:
Raiders HC Klint Kubiak told reporters that Kirk Cousins and Maxx Crosby are being held out of practice today for violating team rules for fighting Friday. https://t.co/0p1VE5w4yo
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) August 8, 2026
Michael Mayer defended Cousins afterward, saying you want him to have some edge. Fair. Raiders fans on X are already turning it into a bit, joking that the offseason memes about Cousins “becoming a true Raider” actually came true. Also fair.
This team dropped $281 million in free agency and talked all offseason about competition and discipline, and now it has one day of both, delivered in the form of a QB choking up on a wideout’s collar. The rankings snub isn’t the real problem here. The real problem is Kubiak’s had a week to make the “open competition” line believable, and instead of him proving it, his players had to fight about it.
Now it’s on him to make sure that’s the last time.
