Coach Dennis Allen has already named Matt Schaub the Raiders’ starting quarterback for the 2014 season, but that’s not stopping them from taking a look at the quarterback options that will be available in next month’s draft.
Texas A&M’s Johnny Manziel and Pittsburgh’s Tom Savage were in for visits with the team last week and Steve Corkran of the Bay Area News Group reports that Central Florida’s Blake Bortles visited with the team on Monday.
Bortles has been all over the league over the last few weeks as he’s met with teams considering quarterbacks in May, although his travels have coincided with reports from PFT and elsewhere that some of those teams have decided to fill other needs early in the draft. Bortles is still expected to be a first-round pick, but he may not go quite as early in the round as was expected a month ago.
The Raiders are one of the teams included in those reports, although it bears mentioning that the weeks leading up to the draft are filled with a lot of misinformation as teams jockey for position to get the players they really want and that knowing what Bortles and others bring to the table has value in trade talks whether or not they slip down the board.