Sweet taste of victory? Not with 4 turnovers
Scott Ostler: Is Del Rio missing bigger issues?
ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. — Turnovers? That’s what this was all about, the Raiders getting Zamboni’d by the Bills, turnovers?
Well, everyone sees a different game, and in the game that Oakland head coach Jack Del Rio saw Sunday, turnovers were the significant factor in his team’s 34-14 loss.
When it was all over but the shufflin’ out of Buffalo, Del Rio homed in on those doggone turnovers.
“We talked coming into this game about (the Bills’) ability to feast on turnovers,” Del Rio said. “It’s a big part of what they’ve done to start the year. Definitely one of the musts coming in was to protect
the ball, take it away ourselves. We end up minus-4 today. Clearly that was the biggest factor in the game, I mean it usually is. Minus-4, not many people win with minus-4.”
Chalking up this loss to turnovers is kind of like blaming the Hindenburg thing on an electrical short in the blimp’s turn signals. Harmful, but there were bigger problems.
This was not the Raiders stubbing their toe on a couple of fumbles. This was the Raiders sinking deeper in the quicksand, losing their fifth game in the past six.
These are the Raiders of the Lost Spark. Harrison Ford, please pick up the white courtesy phone.
Turnovers aside, the Raiders are floundering. Half the season is over and the Raiders are half-baked. Turnovers, schmurnovers.
The Raiders’ calling card, remember, is their dynamic offense, especially the longball capabilities of quarterback Derek Carr and whizbang receivers Amari Cooper and Michael Crabtree.
After the game’s opening drive, the Raiders turtled into dink-n-dunk mode, until garbage time. That first drive aside, for the first three quarters, Carr was 12-for-19 for 107 yards, against a suspect and injury-depleted Buffalo secondary.
Why did the Raiders stop taking shots downfield after that first drive?
“I can’t answer for that,” Del Rio said. “Nobody was saying, ‘Don’t take a shot.’ I can’t speak to that right now.”
Whoa. Whoa. What Del Rio seemed to be saying was that he, too, was puzzled that offensive coordinator Todd Downing stopped having Carr and his danger rangers stretch the field.
The question is, if Del Rio also noticed the retreat to a dump-off passing game, why didn’t he get on the headsets and tell Downing, “Yo, hoss. Take a shot”?
The Raiders, in terms of the long ball, have become the San Francisco Giants. If I’m the Raiders, that worries me more than turnovers do.
Remember the Raiders’ previous game, the inspiring 31-30 win over Kansas City, when Carr threw 19 passes to Cooper? Through three quarters Sunday, Carr tossed four passes to Cooper, completing two, for 17 yards.
Carr’s passer rating for those first three quarters was 66.7, and if I were the Raiders, I would worry more about my all-world quarterback regressing to Average Joe than I would about turnovers.
Turnovers? What about adjustments? Hello? After the Raiders marched to that impressive touchdown to open the game, Del Rio and his staff got out-adjusted by Sean McDermott and the Bills’ coaches.
And yet Del Rio said, “At the end of the day, the biggest detriment or factor was minus-4 turnovers.”
Turnovers. Two of them were Carr interceptions, one of which doesn’t count, a desperation heave when the game was lost. That leaves three turnovers, and that would not have been killer had the Raiders forced one or two turnovers.
Instead, Oakland went interception-less for the eighth straight game, and not only did the Raiders not sack quarterback Tyrod Taylor, they didn’t get close enough to shout insults at him.
Khalil Mack, the league’s reigning Defensive Player of the Year, went sackless and made two tackles. The Bills found a way to make the league’s best defensive player disappear. That’s a mental turnover, chalked up to either Mack or to Del Rio and defensive coordinator Ken Norton Jr.
Your superb quarterback and his scary-good wideouts got nullified. Your defensive monster got sat on.
And all of these things are a trend, not a one-game aberration. The team with Super Bowl aspirations is headed to Florida for a week, like a kid who got a bad report card and doesn’t want to come home.
The Raiders face three tough games in a row. They are on the brink of major disaster.
Del Rio’s questioners persisted. Did he want to see more urgency on offense, a more daring passing game?
“I’m not sure where you’re going with that,” Del Rio said, a bit exasperated. “I feel like, don’t have four turnovers, see what it looks like, probably look a little better.”
OK, then. It was the turnovers.
“At the end of the day, the biggest detriment ... was minus-4 turnovers.” Jack Del Rio, Raiders head coach