Antonio Pierce Makes Major Announcement About Las Vegas Raiders QB Battle

The Las Vegas Raiders have had one storyline hanging over their head throughout the entire offseason: the competition for the starting quarterback role, between Aidan O'Connell and Gardner Minshew.

Neither of these two has been held in the highest regard this offseason, and the Raiders competition has been dubbed one of the worst quarterback situations in the league.

However, each of them played pretty well during the Raiders preseason opener against the Minnesota Vikings . Las Vegas would lose the game 24-23, but they saw some good things from both of their hopeful signal-callers.

However, still, neither of them have done enough to prove themselves to be the best candidate. Raiders' head coach Antonio Pierce is hopeful that one of them will do that soon, and he prefers to make his decision after the Raiders' second preseason game, against the Dallas Cowboys this coming Saturday:

“The goal will be to hopefully make a decision after the game this Saturday... We have to get ready to play football. We have enough film and we’ll have two games to evaluate both quarterbacks to see how they’ll play.”

Pierce stresses that the team has to 'get ready to play football'. To be more specific, he likely wants a chance for the first-team offense to get comfortable reps with their starter before the regular season starts, since each quarterback has split reps with the first-team throughout the offseason.

Related: Four Standouts From Raiders' First Preseason Game

Each quarterback got one quarter during the team's preseason opener, and both were pretty effective . It's likely that each quarterback will get one quarter each again in this week's game.

Pierce spoke about how he'd like each guy to get an equal amount of opportunities, giving him a chance to get the fairest evaluation possible:

“Aidan had nine attempts and Gardner had 12... You’d like the numbers to be equal, but they weren’t. I thought both guys were efficient. I thought there were some opportunities down the field Minshew made that were good. When it’s a clean pocket, you can see what this offense can be with both guys.”