Run ‘D’ is killing playoff hopes
Colts run for whopping 212 yards during their lopsided 44-27 victory over Vegas
The Raiders admit they don’t have answers for their abysmal efforts trying to stop the run lately, which includes the whopping 212 yards rushing they allowed Sunday while getting trampled by the Colts.
That didn’t prevent the Raiders from aggressively seeking a solution by shaking things up after their 44-27 loss, though.
It’s now up to 71-year- old Rod Marinelli to solve the Raiders’ defensive issues — and he has about four days to show real progress. The defensive line coach, a former Cowboys defensive coordinator, was named Raiders interim defensive coordinator less than three hours after the game when Paul Guenther was fired.
Marinelli’s first task is to identify what’s gone horribly wrong for a Raiders run defense that was more than respectable through the first 10 games of the season — they had allowed 112.2 yards on the ground at that point — before giving up 418 yards the last two weeks.
No one else, not coach Jon Gruden nor his players, seemed able to figure out what exactly went wrong Sunday when the Raiders gave up back-to-back 200yard rushing games in a season for the first time since 2003. But at least Gruden didn’t pull a Bill Callahan and question his team’s intelligence, like Callahan did in ’03.
“Defensively, we had no answers,” Gruden told reporters. “Can’t give up that many yards rushing and not get to the quarterback and lose the turnover margin and expect to win in this league.”
The answers may be found while sifting through the at-times unwatchable tape from the Raiders’ third loss in four games. At least that’s the hope.
“It’s hard to pinpoint something without watching the film,” linebacker Nick Kwiatkoski said after the Raiders dropped to 7- 6 in humbling fashion. “Whatever the film says, you go back and look at that. But I mean, one thing that sticks out is stopping the run game. I don’t know the exact yardage they ran for, but we have to stop it.”
Defensive tackle Johnathan Hankins stopped short of pointing fingers, but said something needed to change for a defense that’s now allowed 181.0 yards rushing over its last three games.
“From the looks of it, obviously we didn’t do a good job of being in our gaps (or) playing together as a unit,” Hankins said. “We gotta take pride in stopping the run and move on to the next game.”
Curiously, the troubles against the run began after their “feel-good loss” to the Chiefs in Week 11, right when the Raiders seemed primed to do some damage of their own. Perhaps most troubling, none of the teams that have gashed the Raiders run defense the last three weeks — Falcons, Jets or Colts — were among the top 15 rushing teams in the league. And none of them had a star running
back doing the damage.
The Raiders, though, cer tainly helped those little- to lesser- known backs resemble Hall of Famers. At la nt a’s It o Smith (career- high 65 yards) slashed like Emmitt Smith; the Jets’ Ty Joh n s on (c a r e er - h i g h 104 yards) sliced through tacklers like John Henry Johnson; and Colts rookie Jonathan Taylor (careerhigh 150 yards) rumbled like Jim Taylor on Sunday.
Remarkably, until three weeks ago, defending the run had actually been one of the few things the Raiders could count on from their 30th- ranked de - fense.
Their sudden inability to slow down the run is also one of the reasons the Raiders have now allowed opponents to convert 50.3 percent of their third-down plays. That’s bad, but it’s
even worse when you consider no team in the NFL over the past 30 years has allowed their opponents to convert more than 50 percent of their third- down tries in a season.
The trend continued Sunday when the Raiders allowed a season-worst 73 percent (8- of-11) on thirddown plays. Included in those Colts conversions were first- down runs of 15 yards by Taylor and 11 yards by Hines on thirdand-10 and third- and- 4 plays, respectively. Those chunk plays led to a Colts field goal at the end of the first half.
Things got progressively worse for the Raiders in the second half as they enabled the Colts to pile up 124 more rushing yards. Half of those yards came on Taylor’s electric 62-yard touchdown run midway through the third quarter.