After loss, team ready to ‘attack’ with its offense

SARASOTA, Fla. — Late Wednesday morning, as the Raiders held a relaxed walk-through on the grounds of their team hotel in Sarasota, a few people stood watching from sunlit balconies of an adjacent hotel, some 20 floors up, intrigued by the sight of a large group of men moving in deliberate synchronicity across the top of a parking garage.

The air was calm and clear, and it was impossible to tell if the onlookers, from that height and distance, fully discerned what they were watching: an embattled NFL team, lately a darling of prognosticators, facing by any measure a crossroads of its 2017 season.

The Raiders arrived in Sarasota last Sunday night a 3-5 team that, in the words of head coach

Jack Del Rio, needed to “kind of get our mojo back.” Their weeklong stay on the East Coast would possess a sense of “urgency,” Del Rio said, their operation an “attention to detail” that would be “heightened.”

They left late Saturday for Miami and a prime-time game against the Dolphins, optimistic that what changes were made during a week at the IMG Academy and Ritz-Carlton hotel might fan the flame of their dimming playoff hopes.

“I thought we had, Wednesday and Thursday, probably two of the better practices we’ve had in a while, just in terms of the intensity,” Del Rio said. “Good hard work. Backed way down (Friday) and obviously (Saturday). And then we’ll be ready to roll Sunday night.”

In the wake of a 34-14 loss at Buffalo, quarterback Derek Carr had suggested the Raiders could benefit from practicing harder this week. He said that process began in meetings Tuesday with “voicing my opinion on things, making sure things are right.”

“I’m never going to give up on letting things slide, because we don’t have time,” Carr said. “We ran out of time for that.”

Yet a recurring topic all week was arguably the littlest of things: A 15-yard pass before halftime of a 20-point blowout. Carr said “simple math” led him to eschew a Hail Mary attempt in favor of a higher-percentage checkdown. Del Rio and offensive coordinator Todd Downing said they wanted to see a deep throw.

Oakland’s one win in its past six games came in a shootout with Kansas City in which Carr had as many 20-plus yard attempts (10) as in his first five games of the season. Asked why the offense hasn’t used the formula in other games, receiver Amari Cooper said: “Because the other teams we play aren’t Kansas City. They have different players, different schemes. It’s a different day.”

But at what point does an offense — particularly one said to be as potent as the Raiders’ — try to impose its will regardless?

“As an offense, you want to attack, you want to be dominant,” Cooper said. “So you really want to have that mentality that you want to go out there and take what you want. At the same time you don’t ever really want to make things too hard. So if something is there, you should want to take it. I don’t know. I don’t know where to draw that line.”

Downing — whose offense has attempted 66 percent of its passes within 10 yards of the line of scrimmage, according to Pro Football Focus — agreed that it’s a “fine line.”

“And I think sometimes the defense is giving you more than what you may originally think,” Downing said. “So it’s my job to design a good game plan that attacks the softness in defenses, or the vulnerabilities if you will, and also my job, or the coaching staff ’s job, to get people in the right place at the right time so that we can go out and execute.”

The Raiders rank in the bottom half of the NFL in yards per game (20th), rushing offense (26th) and scoring (19th). They also rank 25th in total defense, with Del Rio saying this week he thinks the unit has been “probably overly cautious.”

Sunday’s game against a Miami team with the league’s lowest-scoring offense could determine if the Raiders will still be contenders after their Week 10 bye. To Cooper, it’s simple math.

“If you just look at the numbers, you pretty much have to get 10 wins to get into the playoffs, sometimes more than that,” Cooper said. “Where we’re sitting at now, we can only possibly get 11 wins. So of course, we’re going to have to stack up these wins.”