Insider explains why Jack Bech has yet to sign his rookie deal

The Las Vegas Raiders have signed all but one member of their 2025 draft class, with second-round wide receiver Jack Bech the lone unsigned rookie.

This has nothing to do with an impasse already forming between Bech and the Raiders, and it is expected that the receiver will sign his deal before training camp begins. However, Bech is caught within an anomaly in this year’s draft class. So far, the only two confirmed signings out of every second-round pick are the top two in Cleveland Browns linebacker Carson Schwesinger and Houston Texans wide receiver Jayden Higgins.

The latter of those two may be what is holding up Bech signing, as well as his fellow second-round rookies.

How the Texans handled Higgins’s negotiations is playing a role in Bech not signing yet.

NFL insider John McClain spoke to Raider Nation Radio’s “Unnecessary Roughness” host Q Myers about Bech not signing, and he explained why the Raiders and other teams might not be particularly fond of the Texans.

“They can blame that on the Texans. They gave a fully guaranteed contract to their first pick in the second-round wide receiver Jayden Higgins and then the Browns did it [with] Carson Schwesinger, [the] linebacker from UCLA. No other second round picks got them,” McClain said.

“All the agents were like, ‘Hey, they did it. We want to do it,” McClain added. “They did it for one, you can do it for all, so everybody that’s struggling to get their second-round pick signed should blame Nick Caserio, the Texans general manager.”

It is not difficult to see why players and agents want the same type of deal for themselves.

Up until this point, only first-round picks got fully guaranteed deals, but Higgins getting one opened the door for this class to do the same. With Schwesinger being drafted ahead of Higgins, the Browns had no choice but to offer him a fully guaranteed contract, and the question now becomes where the new limit for a fully guaranteed deal is. Having their money guaranteed gives Bech and his contemporaries longer leashes in terms of their development and performance, even if it does not guarantee they stay with the same team during their contracts (Raiders fans can look directly to 2021 first-round pick Alex Leatherwood).

The Texans have created a new problem for teams to solve, and the Raiders are one of the teams forced to come to terms with the new reality.