By Yardbarker,Zac Wassink

Copyright yardbarker

“When Carroll signed here, I knew he would be coming for me, and it was a matter of time before that happened,” Smith explained. “The other options [I had], I kind of took them off the table. I looked at their offers, and they were decent offers, but I wanted to be with coach Carroll.”

“Pete knew everything there was to know about him, and he had played his best football for Pete,” Spytek said about Smith during a recent conversation with Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic. “And so when we talked about what we wanted…you listen to (Pete) talk (about Smith) and ‘he’s got this trait and this trait and this trait,’ and that’s all the stuff we’re looking for. That allowed me to ask questions. ‘What about this?’ ‘Yup. Yup. Yup.’ …Pete had a front-row seat to that. When I’ve manifested in my head what I’ve wanted in a quarterback…it was a lot of the same stuff that Pete could confirm that Geno had. And ultimately, it just felt like he was the right guy for us right now, to be the kind of football team we want to be.”

“I finally got my team,” Smith told McFadden. “I always felt like I was trying to replace [Russell Wilson in Seattle], and you can never replace all the great things that he did. So I never felt like Seattle was my team. Also, I didn’t feel like I fit the aesthetic of the Seattle organization. The Raiders just fit me.”