The Maxx Crosby “controversy” has officially entered its performance-art phase, where online commentators scream that the Las Vegas Raiders are “tanking” while ignoring the part where No. 98 has been dragging a leg for two months and still playing like it is the AFC title game.
If the Raiders were intent on mailing in the season, they would have mailed him home in early November and bubble-wrapped Brock Bowers right next to him.
This is not complicated. The Raiders have won two games in 15 tries. The season effectively ended before December. At some point, an organization must decide whether pushing an already battered superstar into two meaningless contests is leadership or malpractice. Sitting Crosby now is not capitulation; it is risk management.
For once, the Raiders chose Crosby’s future over chasing a pointless December sack.
Sitting Maxx Crosby now is not capitulation; it’s risk management. The Raiders aren’t tanking.
No one’s tanking; the Raiders actually suck…
Calling that “tanking” cheapens the word and misunderstands the stakes. Tanking requires intent. It requires strategy. It requires shutting down stars early, not squeezing every last ounce out of them until the final weeks and only then taking their ankle off the stove. If the Raiders wanted losses, Crosby would have been parked weeks ago. Instead, they let him play through injuries that would sideline most of the league. That is the opposite of a covert organizational sabotage.
Crosby isn’t demanding out, and the idea that he is belongs in the fiction aisle. He’s wired for conflict and obsessed with competing. Of course he’s ticked off. Of course he disagrees. That’s who he is—and exactly why the Raiders value him.
Intensity isn’t a fracture, and frustration isn’t a breakup.
Reading a two-week shutdown as a sign of divorce ignores every layer of context. If this logic held, Brock Bowers—also shut down—would be the co-headliner in this imaginary trade drama. He isn’t, because the narrative falls apart the moment you apply it consistently.
Is it “developing”? Well, only in the sense that everything on a 2-12 team is. Right now, the truth is simple: Crosby wants to play, and the front office wants him healthy for the future. Everything else is noise trying to masquerade as news.
*Top Photo: Benjamin Hegar/Las Vegas Review-Journal