The Las Vegas Raiders are surprisingly 2-0 to start the season, but sports media has gotten so comfortable in its habit of ignoring the usually sorry franchise that you may not have noticed.
Kyle Brandt is hoping to change that. The popular NFL Network commentator joined ESPN’s Big Day on Wednesday to call attention to the upstart Raiders and challenge the network’s most-watched show to ride the wave.
“Nobody wants to hear about the Raiders. Believe me, I know. I’ve been on 26 football shows today, and I have not been asked about the Raiders once,” Brandt joked.
“The autumn wind is a Raider, but the A-block is a Chief, Bronco, and Charger. Let me tell you something. The production e-mail for First Take is so long I can’t open it unless I’m connected to WiFi. And there’s not a single Raiders question in all 78 pages. The email asks for Bucs takes, Panthers takes, Steelers takes. I scrolled all the way to the bottom where it says, ‘Let us know if there’s anything else you’re hot on.’ Nothing. The 2-0 Raiders aren’t even compelling enough to be First Take‘s last take.”
“I’m hot on the BLEEPIN’ Raiders.”@KyleBrandt with another passionate locker room speech, this time for the Las Vegas Raiders 👀 pic.twitter.com/EuKRcYmKLu
— Big Day (@BigDayESPN) September 23, 2026
Brandt also called out the NFL schedulers for good measure.
“You know when you’re never gonna see a win? They’re never gonna watch you in primetime,” Brandt said to Raiders fans. “Because in the NFL’s eyes, you are so fantastically uninteresting that you’re not even worthy of a single primetime showcase. Not even the back-end of some doubleheader on Peacock that kicks off at 10 p.m. Pacific. They wouldn’t even put you on Quibi. The Browns have a primetime game!”
The Raiders’ win total line was set somewhere around 5.5 before the season, and the team has largely not been relevant since its departure from Oakland. Yet even without No. 1 overall pick Fernando Mendoza (who, in fairness, Brandt has loved for a while), the Raiders have managed to beat both Miami and the Chargers by double digits.
In fairness to First Take and the other 25 shows Brandt said ignored Las Vegas, the most notable thing about the team is that one of its minority owners calls games for Fox and might soon enter the WWE ring. Of the Raiders’ two most well-known players, one is a tight end who has missed the first two games of the season and the other spent multiple days of the offseason as a member of the Baltimore Ravens before the trade fell through.
There isn’t exactly a ton to dissect about the Raiders despite a solid start.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is an Editorial Lead at Awful Announcing overseeing digital content and special projects. He lives in Phoenix and has covered sports media for Awful Announcing since 2023.