Despite pain, he didn’t miss a game
People were surprised the other day to hear that Raiders receiver Seth Roberts played last season with a double hernia. Count head coach Jack Del Rio among them.
“It was news to me,” Del Rio said. “I said (to him), ‘Hey, really?’ ... He said, ‘Yeah, I didn’t tell you.’ I said, ‘Well, who did you tell?’ He said, ‘I didn’t tell anybody.’ I said, ‘OK, well, that’s your right. You didn’t miss any practices.’ He said, ‘Nope.’ OK.”
Roberts not only played all 16 games with the injury but did not miss a practice (and obviously was not listed on a weekly injury report). Despite a leaguehigh 13 drops, his catches increased to 38 (from 32 in 2015) and he had game-winning catches at New Orleans and at Tampa Bay.
Turns out Roberts has an excuse for all those drops. Not that he would ever use it, considering that word of the hernia injury didn’t leak until receivers
coach Rob Moore mentioned it last week.
“It was tough mentally,” Roberts said. “I just had to stay in it. It was a real struggle but I made it happen. I got through the season. It wasn’t my best and I didn’t feel my best, but I made it happen. I had to do it.”
Del Rio is impressed with Roberts’ toughness, and said the third-year receiver learned from the best.
“I certainly appreciate guys that find a way to be out there for their team and their teammates,” Del Rio said. “We had a couple of tremendous illustrations of what it looked like when Charles Woodson was here and the way he gutted it out and played through things. I think that legacy lives on a little bit now with some guys toughing it out. That’s good stuff.
“Now we want them to be smart. I’d like them to report anything they had, but I respect his decision to keep it to himself and just play.”
Roberts has looked great at training camp, and quickly silenced those who thought Cordarrelle Patterson might push him at the No. 3 receiver spot.
Derek Carr is not surprised by that. The quarterback said people typically stop and talk to him about how great it must be to throw to Amari Cooper and Michael Crabtree.
“They’re great, but so is Seth,” Carr tells them.
In his first two seasons, the wiry receiver led the NFL with four game-winning touchdown catches. Oakland was 11-0 in games in which he scored a touchdown or two-point conversion.
“I don’t know why he goes under the radar so much,” Carr said, “but that man has made game-winning catch after bigtime play and all these things, and it’s because he works his tail off. There’s no secret. This man goes out there every single day. He puts in the extra work when nobody is watching.”
And he winced in pain when no one was watching. Roberts had surgery in January and compared how he feels now as opposed to when he was hurt at camp last year.
“It was more mental,” he said. “When your body isn’t all the way how you want it to be or need it to be on game day, I might think I’ve missed a step.”
Roberts tried to make up for it like he always does, by watching film and bugging his quarterback.
“He asks me all the time, ‘Derek, how do you want this run? How do you want this thing done?’ ” Carr said. “When we can be on the same page. … Like we had a mishap (Wednesday), me and Seth. We sat there, talked it out and then the next time we know exactly how we want to do it so we don’t have that in a real game.”
An undrafted free agent out of West Alabama, Roberts smiled when he heard Carr’s comments about being under the radar when it comes to fans.
“They need to know who I am,” he said. “I don’t want to fly under the radar anymore. I’m trying to make it happen. I have a family to provide for.”