Outside Linebacker · Las Vegas Raiders

Cian Slone

No. 48 · Rookie

A court ruling gave him back a year he thought was gone.

Cian Slone started playing football at eight years old in Rocklin, California. His father had played college football; the game was already in the family orbit. For a decade, Slone built toward the standard path — high school ball, a scholarship offer, a four-year program, the NFL if he was good enough. Then his senior season ended before it started.

An ACL injury cut his final year short. When the recruiting dust settled, there were no Division I offers. The path that seemed inevitable simply closed. At eighteen, Slone moved to American River Junior College in North Highlands, a place where second chances were business as usual.

His younger brother Teeg followed him into football a year later, also in Rocklin. The brothers played together at American River, both working toward the transfer window that might get them into a four-year program. In 2023, they made the jump together to Utah State. The move mattered — it was a step up in competition, and proof that the injury had not ended either of them.

At Utah State, Slone earned Academic All-Mountain West honors in each of his two seasons. He was the kind of player coaches notice: accountable on and off the field, a standard the American River staff had instilled in him. But after his 2024 season, he believed his football career was finished. The math was simple. Two years at a junior college, two years in a Power Four conference, and then what? JUCO transfers did not get second chances at the professional level.

Then, in December 2024, a federal court ruled in the case of Diego Pavia that former junior college transfers had earned an extra year of eligibility. The decision was about fairness and a rule everyone had lived by; it changed Slone's life on the same day he learned about it. He entered the transfer portal immediately and committed to NC State.

One more year. One more season to show up as a starter, to compile tape, and to make a case for an NFL contract. Slone took it. In April 2026, the Las Vegas Raiders signed him as an undrafted free agent, guaranteeing him $272,500 — the largest guarantee the team gave any UDFA that year.

The numbers say what they say. But what sits underneath them is simpler: a kid whose senior year was stolen by injury, who took the path available instead of the one promised, who moved through a junior college to a Power Four program alongside his brother, who prepared relentlessly for a professional opportunity everyone told him he would never get, and who got one anyway — because a court ruled that the old rule was wrong. Sometimes survival is just being ready when the door opens.

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