Ann Killion: Everyone’s restless as the Raiders’ offense keeps getting worse each week.
With every passing week, the Raiders’ situation becomes worse. More baffling. More frustrating if you had anything — emotions, money, time — invested in them.
With Sunday’s loss to the Chargers, the Raiders fell to 1-8. That is the third-worst start in franchise history.
Only the 0-13 start in 1962, the Raiders’ third year of existence, and the 0-10 start in 2014 — when the team fired head coach Dennis Allen after four games — are worse.
Not even the 2006 Art Shell/ Tom Walsh train wreck or the 2007 Lane Kiffin dysfunction can match the disaster that is the 2018 Jon Gruden encore season.
“This will be a year that a lot of us will never forget,” Gruden said after the 20-6 loss. “It’s painful. It is hard. It will be hard to sleep again, hard to get up in the morning.
“But this will be the foundation this organization leans on: mental toughness, physical toughness. I know it sounds corny to some people, but that’s the grit and toughness this organization was built on, and that is what we’ll continue to strive for.”
Well, wake us when you find it. Because it is not apparent to the naked eye, and it wasn’t simply disguised by the smoke in the air Sunday. The Raiders haven’t scored a touchdown since they took a 28-21 lead in the third quarter over Indianapolis on Oct. 28. Since that time, they’ve been outscored 75-9.
The team employees are down in the dumps. The fans are angry. The players seem disconnected.
The whole season could be summed up with the Raiders’ last gasp of hope Sunday: a 4th-and-5 play from the Chargers’ 19. Derek Carr was under pressure and rather than attempt to complete a pass, he threw the ball into the ground.
The boos and derision from the customers who remained rained down on the field. It was futility illustrated — frustrating and basically incomprehensible. A commentator on Twitter likened the decision to the Cavaliers’ J.R. Smith forgetting the score in Game 1 of the NBA Finals.
After the game, Carr seemed unusually down in the dumps. He said it was because of something that happened that frustrated him, but that he wasn’t going to share. Maybe the season is taking a toll on Mr. Optimism.
Carr compared this season to his rookie season, when the Raiders went 0-10 before finally beating Kansas City 24-20.
“We had no clue what we were doing,” Carr said. “Speaking for myself, I had no idea what I was getting into. You just hope that it’s not like this forever.
“Now, I have faith. There’s no doubt in my mind I know it’s going to get better. Obviously, it’s not doing that right now.”
But back in 2014, it is true that the team didn’t know what it was doing. It was young, a rebuild after a teardown. But the team grew, and it became competitive two years later. That’s the normal growth trajectory. But then Gruden arrived and dismantled what so recently had been put together, including — it appears — any remnants of the confidence and cohesion that was there in 2016.
This is more inexplicable than the 2014 season. Far more.
Gruden spoke of the problem of being “doubled up” by the Chargers: being scored on at the end of the first half and then again at the beginning of the third quarter. It’s one of the reasons teams typically defer after winning the coin flip, choosing to kick off in the first half and receive the ball in the second half.
“Doubling up” a team is a momentum-crusher, a soulsucker and it has happened to the Raiders against the 49ers, against the Seahawks and in the earlier meeting with the Chargers. The Raiders have responded by simply not responding.
But, hey, there are only seven weeks to go.
“We’re going to keep working hard, keep preparing as hard as we can, keep developing the players that are here, and hopefully that translates into some wins,” Gruden said, after lauding his team’s effort in his opening statement.
“We have seven weeks to spend with these players. The future is something we’ll talk about later. Right now, it is hard to lose, but we are seeing some progress with our young players and some of these veteran guys are giving us everything they have.”
Though the Raiders were — surprise, surprise — eliminated from AFC West title contention Sunday, the Chargers are one of the surprise teams in the league. The homeless team (once San Diego, now called Los Angeles but unwanted by the city, and playing in Carson) is 7-2.
The Chargers have had plenty of their own chaos over the years: Quarterback Philip Rivers has played for four head coaches, his team has been treated like an unwanted child by the NFL, he has been moved from the place his team should be playing and every game is basically an away game. But during those years of chaos, the Chargers have finished last in the division only twice, and have — more often than not — contended for the AFC West’s top spot. They’re doing it again.
The Raiders, meanwhile, seem to drop to the lowest level whenever given an opportunity.
And right now, they are in a historically awful season.
“It takes a toll on all of us,” Gruden said.