Maxx Crosby was back in the Las Vegas Raiders’ facility at 6 a.m. Wednesday morning, back to the grind that defines him. He lives to play football, and a revoked trade and depressing return flight from Baltimore on Tuesday night couldn’t change that.
From his first preseason game with the Raiders — when he broke his hand, had it taped up into a caveman-like club and kept playing — Crosby has never stopped. He’s left bits and pieces of himself all over football fields and had eight surgeries in seven years, the most recent of which gave the Baltimore Ravens enough pause to cancel their agreed-to trade of two first-round picks for Crosby.
Crosby, who turns 29 in August, is recovering from surgery to repair a torn meniscus in his knee, and though he is expected to be available to play next season, league sources told The Athletic that the Ravens had concerns about the long-term outlook.
Other teams might, too, before they could consider trading for Crosby. The Raiders will hold on to him for now, as he continues rehabbing from the injury, and perhaps much longer. On Wednesday night, Crosby posted on social media saying, “(I’m) a Raider. I’m back.”
Will trade talks pick up again? The Raiders want to rebuild, and heck, they were carrying the plan out Monday and Tuesday before, in their words, the Ravens “backed out.” If talks do resume, another team might not be able to pass up a chance at an elite pass rusher — Crosby leads the NFL with 360 pressures since he entered the league.
That would mean more physicals, as teams try to assess the wear and tear on a body that never stops moving. Crosby has played more than 84 percent of the Raiders’ defensive snaps since 2020, the highest share by any NFL edge defender over that span, per TruMedia.
He doesn’t like to sit out a play, much less a game, even when he is hurt. There was plenty of evidence of that long before he stormed out of the team facility in December after being shut down for the final two weeks, setting this whole saga in motion. (The Raiders were trying to lock up the draft’s No. 1 pick, and it turns out, were doing Crosby a favor.)
There was the season finale in January 2021, when Crosby played with a broken right hand and a torn left shoulder — and blocked two field goals.
“He’s a crazy son of a b—-,” then-defensive coordinator Paul Guenther said.
That was nothing compared to three seasons later, when Crosby had to be hospitalized on Thanksgiving with a knee infection that had him bedridden for a few days. With the Bacteria drained from his knee, the fever and cold sweats finally let up, and Crosby could barely walk the next day, but there he was on the field — getting a sack — in a loss to the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday.
“He was like, ‘I’ll die before I don’t play in this game,’” said then-defensive line coach Rob Leonard, who is now the team’s defensive coordinator. “He’s a special person.”
Crosby has said the adrenaline carries him in such cases, “and the pain doesn’t even hit until you are in the locker room after.”
The 2019 fourth-round pick out of Eastern Michigan has built himself into a player who will stop the run and won’t let one (or two) blockers keep him from getting in the quarterback’s face. Since 2020, Crosby has more games with at least nine QB pressures (six) than with zero pressures (four), per TruMedia. And he’s done that with very few fourth-quarter leads, and therefore fewer obvious pass-rush opportunities, as the Raiders kept losing and changing general managers and coaches.
Crosby seems to have a lot left. Just last season, he had 10 sacks and a career-high 28 tackles for loss, making his fifth Pro Bowl. That has to be weighed against whatever the Ravens saw — speaking Wednesday, GM Eric DeCosta did not specify why the team nullified the trade — and against the knowledge that what makes Crosby special is what could take a year or two off his career down the road.
As he told Raiders fans in his farewell video last Saturday, “I gave y’all everything I got, and I have no regrets about that.”
Raiders fans will welcome him back, as he embodies the old-school toughness and swagger from the days way back when the team actually won playoff games. And Crosby is making like a wrestler and enjoying the dramatic, unexpected return to the dark side.
Everything Happens For A Reason. Believe Nothing You Hear & Half Of What You See. Im A Raider. I’m Back. Run That Sh*t. 🦅🏴☠️ pic.twitter.com/8IZXiDYMio
— Maxx Crosby (@CrosbyMaxx) March 12, 2026
But, perhaps ideally for all parties, it might not be long before another team decides Crosby’s short-term explosiveness outweighs any long-term question marks. Maybe a new team could try to calm him down. He might even be able to get some rest every now and then on a winning team.
But nobody should try to change him too much. They should want the wild SOB who hounds offensive linemen and quarterbacks relentlessly.
Playing through all those injuries might not have been the smartest thing, in hindsight. But Crosby has always been running full steam ahead. Some team that needs a pass rusher for a Super Bowl push should focus on that more than the Ravens’ medical report.