Manuel clutch, others stall out
OAKLAND >> It’s right there on the first page of the professional athlete cliche handbook: When a key player goes down with an injury, everybody else is supposed to kick it up a notch.
Those handbooks must have been late arriving this season in Oakland. In the wake of quarterback Derek Carr’s transverse process injury last week, only one Raiders player kicked it up a notch Sunday in a dispiriting 30-17 Coliseum defeat to the Baltimore Ravens. That would be Carr’s backup, EJ Manuel, the one guy everybody was most worried about being able to get it done.
Manuel was fine. He did his part and got enough done. He actually kept the team in the game with some strong throws and nifty improvisation with his feet. As he was last week when he relieved Carr at Denver, he was poised if not necessarily polished. He’d done his prep work, he was ready to play, he was ready to win.
But the rest of the Raiders? They weren’t ready. They down-
shifted into yet another lower gear of mediocrity with their third straight ugly loss following those two impressive opening wins. This one might have been the worst of the bunch considering the team’s dire need to circle the wagons with Carr out. Instead, they essentially let the wheels of the wagons fall off in the first four minutes of the game, and then played a desperate game of catch-up the rest of the afternoon. Suffice it to say they never did.
Where did those early Raiders go? Not time to go to Las Vegas yet, not even close. But suddenly, these guys look like they’re cashing in their chips after Week 5.
Something’s definitely amiss beyond Carr’s absence. The defense was mostly horrible. Quality pass-catching outside of Michael Crabtree was pretty much non-existent, with much-ballyhooed receiving mate Amari Cooper once again having another noshow outing — one fourthquarter catch, eight yards, and just two targets.
The play-calling on offense and defense was generally strange and uninspired, the decision-making conservative and ultimately defeating when coach Jack Del Rio passed up going for it on fourth down at midfield with nine minutes to go and his team down by 10. In short, Del Rio tried to show faith in a defense that had let him down all day and it predictably let him down one last time. Baltimore went on a drive that consumed 6:26 of the remaining 8:50, and Oakland was cooked.
Del Rio looked shaken afterward and he should be. This is just his second three-game losing streak in his third season with the Raiders, and after last year’s 12-4 campaign, nobody expected this club to lose three straight, especially after such a highpowered 2-0 start. He admitted this performance about-face might be getting into his players’ heads.
“I think you’d have to have a little question about the confidence level,” Del Rio said. “You just went out and didn’t get it done three weeks in a row. To me, it’s real simple. It’s a group of men, prideful men. We’ll get back in the saddle, get back to work.”
Did Manuel play well enough — 10 for 18, 134 yards, a TD pass and no interceptions — to expect that the Raiders should have won?
“Well, we didn’t win, so it wasn’t well enough to win,” Del Rio said. “But I thought he did a pretty solid job as a backup guy coming into a tough situation and handled himself well.”
Manuel seemed satisfied with the job he’d done, other than the end result.
“It felt good,” he said. “It was my first time starting this year, I wanted to cap it off with a W. That not the way we wanted to start the game, of course. We tried to battle back and put ourselves in a position to win, but we came up short.”