Revisiting the 2020 Raiders draft, and what happens when a roster build goes wrong

The 2020 Las Vegas Raiders draft remains a flashpoint for how quickly NFL roster plans can unravel. In retrospect, one prominent re-draft exercise argues the Raiders entered the 2020 class with serious capital, including two first-round selections and three third-round selections, and still produced results that failed to carry forward as core pieces. The exercise frames the class as “arguably one of the worst in the modern era,” a conclusion driven less by single-player outcomes and more by how many of those top selections did not become long-term answers.

The same-position re-draft concept matters because it tries to correct for one of the biggest questions in evaluation, would the team’s needs have been better served by selecting different prospects who played similar roles in the league. In this case, the debate is not about the Raiders choosing from a blank slate. It is about teams making highly specific decisions with premium draft slots and then living with the long tail of those choices, especially when the draft haul is large and the expectations are correspondingly high.

According to the discussion tied to this re-draft exercise, only two players from the Raiders’ 2020 first- and third-round selections are still in the NFL today: John Simpson and Amik Robertson. That framing is central to the argument that the overall class did not convert into durability. The same source characterizes the remaining five first- or third-round selections as no longer being in the league, and it further states that two of those players are in prison. Those details, even as they are used to support a larger evaluation point rather than a single narrative, underscore how one draft class can influence a team’s competence perception for years.

John Simpson’s presence serves as the counterweight to the critique, representing how at least some value can emerge even from a class otherwise described as a major failure. Amik Robertson, likewise, is highlighted as the other lingering piece. But the re-draft framing emphasizes a hard truth in NFL team building: a draft class is not judged by whether it produces any survivors, it is judged by whether it produces enough impact and enough staying power to justify the cost of time and opportunity.

Why does a “same-position re-draft” exercise keep resonating? Because teams rarely rebuild in a straight line, and every failed draft selection can compound. When high picks do not remain on the roster, the organization must spend more resources to replace production elsewhere, whether through additional drafting, free agency, or both. The Raiders’ 2020 haul, as described in the discussion, was large enough that expectations for results were naturally higher than they would have been with a smaller allocation of premium picks.

There is also a cultural angle in the way fans talk about drafts. In years when a team finishes seasons with pressure to find solutions, draft debates shift from “who was the best player” to “who was the right player” and, ultimately, “what would you do differently with the same positional target.” That is the heart of the exercise: it attempts to reimagine the roster plan by keeping positional categories aligned while changing the specific prospect outcomes. Even if readers disagree with the imagined alternatives, the usefulness of the exercise is that it spotlights the gap between draft planning and draft execution.

What to watch next is not a new Raiders season in isolation, but how the franchise continues to reflect on value creation from premium resources. The 2020 class, as portrayed in this analysis, offers a cautionary case study in the NFL’s unforgiving math: the more premium picks a team holds, the more the results must become a foundation, not a footnote. If the Raiders have built stability in later classes, those seasons can function as the practical rebuttal to this critique. If they have not, the same-position re-draft conversation will remain a recurring reminder of what happens when a roster plan misses its mark.