With Sunday’s win over the Jets, the Oakland Raiders moved to 4-3 on the season and, somewhat unexpectedly, into the lead for Wild Card contention in the AFC. It wasn’t just that the Raiders won, either. They won convincingly against an opponent who is also currently in line to make the playoffs.
The Raiders offense made the vaunted Jets’ defense look impotent for most of the game and Oakland’s defense shut the Jets out of the end zone in the first half and gave up two TDs in the second only after the game was out of hand for the Jets.
It was a pretty impressive performance on both sides of the ball a mere week after the team completely dominated the Chargers in San Diego for the first three quarters of the game before letting Phillip Rivers and the San Diego offense back in the game with a poor fourth quarter.
Each week this season, the Raiders have appeared to grow in front of us. They started the season with a disappointing blow-out loss to the Bengals but no one was anticipating that the Bengals would still be one of the undefeated ted teams 9 weeks into the season.
The next week, the Raiders beat what we now know is a bad Ravens team. The game was in Oakland and it was a back and forth affair, but the Raiders were able to gut out the win and it was a big first step for the team.
After that, the team achieved a win in the Eastern time zone in Cleveland, something they hadn’t done in over half a decade. Again, the team looked to be growing.
The following back to back losses in Chicago and against the Broncos followed and were disappointing to the team and to fans but the games were tight and there were still clues that the team was improving.
Coming off of the win in Cleveland on Eastern Time, flying back for part of a week, and then flying out to Chicago to play the Bears, at home, with QB Jay Cutler coming back from injury – the game had every opportunity to become a typical Raiders blow-out loss after expectations were raised. But instead, the Raiders fought hard and the game came down to a last second field goal to give Chicago the victory in regulation time. It was a close contest and it could have gone either way.
Against Denver, the Raiders played the divisional foe as well as any opponent this year. Denver, like Cincinnati W1, is undefeated for the year. Again, the Raiders played hard and were in the game the entire time. The coaching staff made some changes on defense to play the tight end position differently and this seemed to bear fruit defensively as the 16 points scored by the Broncos are the lowest that Denver has scored all year. Additionally, the Denver offense was only able to score field goals against the Oakland defense with the lone Bronco TD coming off an interception return.
In the last two, post-bye-week games, the Raiders’ improvement on both sides of the ball has been very clear to even casual observers with the Raiders running out to an enormous lead in San Diego and again versus the Jets at home on Sunday.
On offense, the Raiders have shown the ability to score quickly and to mount sustained drives. They have been able to pass the ball, for the most part, and Carr has not locked in on any one receiver, spreading the ball around to many targets in every game.
On defense, the teams’ first focus has been and will likely remain stopping the run. They have done a very good job with this and are one of the league leaders in run defense. Their pass defense is less strong but has taken some strides in recent weeks, especially now that tight ends are no longer running free down the seam at will.
Credit a deeper talent pool, with Reggie McKenzie adding starters and quality depth in both the draft and free agency.
Credit the coaching staff, who have done a good job on offense of figuring out their playmakers and putting them in the best position to succeed (hello, Marcel Reece and Taiwan Jones resurgence) and a decent job on defense of figuring out which players were most being exploited and in what ways and trying to limit their exposure (fare thee well Curtis Lofton in coverage and Ray-Ray Armstrong in general).
But most of all, credit the players who have taken it upon themselves to make big plays when the moment of need has come.
For the defense, Charles Woodson has been inspirational. He has been a tone-setter for the young members of the secondary, playing through an early shoulder injury and excelling on the field. He currently leads the NFL with 5 interceptions, a couple of which came at the end of games when the defense needed a turnover to seal the victory.
On offense, second year QB Derek Carr has stepped up and become the leader the team, particularly the offense, has needed for quite some time. Carr has looked extremely good the last two weeks versus San Diego and Sunday against the Jets. He is throwing the ball quickly to mitigate pass rusher and making good decisions as well, limiting turnover opportunities for the most part.
In fact, the Raiders have not had any turnovers for the last two weeks, the first time the team has gone two consecutive games without turning the ball over since October of 2010. And the offense is throwing much more and much better in the last few games than they have at any time since NFL-MVP Rich Gannon was under center.
Coming into the season, there were raised expectations for the Raiders based on Carr’s expected development, DE Khalil Mack’s dominating rookie performance, the addition of Amari Cooper and Michael Crabtree as pass catchers, and the new coaching staff and it’s enthusiasm and energy.
These expectations were tempered with caution, however, because of the sustained struggles the team has had and because there have been turn-around discussions before that flared out quickly (See: the Tom Cable and Hue Jackson years). Among the writers, both beat and national, a 7-9 record prediction was commonplace.
At 4-3 currently, the Raiders are in a great position to post their first winning season since 2002 and simultaneously push for the playoffs. They are in this position because they have a unity of focus throughout the organization and much of the credit for that goes to owner Mark Davis.
Davis, who has been running the team since his father, Al Davis, passed away in the middle of the 2011 season, has been a model of consistency in his time as the teams’ owner. After the 2011 season, he hired Reggie McKenzie as his first and only GM and then turned the majority of the team’s decisions over to McKenzie at that time.
With only 11 wins in the teams’ first three full seasons under McKenzie, few would have questioned Davis if he had chosen to part with McKenzie after the 2014 season but he remained firm that McKenzie was the right person to lead the team and that they had done the hard work of clearing away years of salary cap mis-management under his father, drafted and signed some core players to form a solid team nucleous, and were now in a position to have sustained success as a franchise.
The early returns on the season, mentioned above in this article and many other places, indicate that Davis was correct in his assessment of the teams’ health. With a new, more experienced coaching staff in place taking control of the day to day and with many of McKenzie’s draft picks as the focal point for the team, the organization is speaking with one voice as to their intentions: They want to compete for the division, get a winning record, make the playoffs.
Unlike, for example, the team across the Bay there are no dissenting opinions or negativity eating at the squad. This unity of focus is a key part of any good team and something the Raiders haven’t seen in my time following the team.
Even during the successful Jon Gruden years, the team had fighting amongst itself with Gruden’s philosophies and personality not matching Davis’. That lack of unity meant the Raiders’ success window closed faster than it should have with the team going from playing in the Super Bowl to becoming a laughingstock in one season and very little personnel change
This years’ team also feels different than the Cable/Jackson squads under Davis primarily because there isn’t the uncertainty that Al Davis brought to the team. Mark Davis has shown much more patience and understanding in building the team and that resonates through the facility as players, coaches and McKenzie himself can focus on their current jobs instead of worrying about their next one.
Obviously, the work is not over – the team must continue to fight week in and week out. The season is far from over and the story of the season is yet to be told and can still change drastically. However, from this vantage point, it looks like the Raiders are building a very strong base of talent that they can continue to build upon in subsequent seasons’ drafts and free agency.
If they can win this season and get into the playoffs, so much the better. But this season is and has always been about improvement and by that measure this season is already shaping up to be a success. More importantly, the team looks to be on a path of ascension as Peyton Manning’s star is fading and with no other AFC West team moving in a positive direction. The AFC West is a prize the Raiders can win for many seasons if they are able to continue their unified focus in future seasons.
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