Down to the wire: Raiders break up pass in the end zone with three seconds left to beat Detroit 31-24.
Playoff berth not out of question for incomplete Raiders
OAKLAND >> These Raiders aren’t particularly imposing and they’re nothing close to a complete team.
Their offense is overly reliant on one player and their defense is one of the worst units in the NFL. They’ve been blown out three times already this season, and their wins — all of them — have been nail biters.
But none of that seems to matter.
At the season’s halfway point, I’m still asking “Why can’t the Raiders make the playoffs?”
Oakland’s 31-24 win over the Lions Sunday at the Coliseum — which moved the team to 4-4 — served as a case study as to why we cannot write this team off just yet.
The Raiders showed us their
blueprint for victory.
And after seeing it — and looking at the landscape around the league — I think we have to take this Raiders team seriously as a playoff contender.
Is the Raiders’ offense overly reliant running back Josh Jacobs? Without a doubt.
But the rookie out of Alabama is a bona fide star, so it’s hard to take umbrage with giving him the rock.
No. 28 ran 28 times for 120 yards and two touchdowns on Sunday. Those are good, maybe great, numbers, depending on your perspective, but even Jacobs’ short gains were spectacular Sunday and this season. His combination of vision, agility, strength, and speed is legitimately rare — he stands as a stark contradiction to the NFL’s current team-building edict that running backs don’t matter.
Opposing defenses simply must commit — without reservation — to stopping Jacobs when he is in the game. Jacobs’ presence allows the Raiders to still run the ball despite such defensive commitment — he’s so good at making defenders miss and he never falls backward — and those gains, paired with a resourceful play-action passing game, creates balance in the Raiders’ offense.
The Raiders amassed 450 yards of offense Sunday — their second-best total of the season — with 279 coming through the air and 171 coming on the ground against a decent defense.
Carr showed that he still has a bit of magic left in the tank, too. The quarterback’s freelancing, go-ahead 9-yard touchdown pass to Hunter Renfrow with 2:04 remaining in the contest harkened back to his MVPworthy 2016 season, where he lead the Raiders on seven fourth-quarter, game-winning drives.
And it doesn’t hurt that Jon Gruden is showing that he can make secondhalf adjustments, the offensive line is blocking well despite a steady stream of injuries, and tight end Darren Waller has developed into a matchup nightmare.
(Could you imagine how much better the unit — which is one of the most efficient in the NFL this season — would be if they had a true No. 1 wide receiver?)
Yes, this Raiders’ offense — if it can keep Jacobs on the field (and that’s proven to be tricky) — is good enough to lead Oakland to the playoffs.
No, the real question for the Raiders as they push forward in this campaign is if their defense can hold up its end of the bargain.
If you just look at the stat sheet following Sunday’s game, you’d raise plenty of red flags — Detroit gained 473 yards with ease — if not flat-out disqualify them. But a unit filled with replacement-level players and youngsters — a squad with a generally inept pass rush, a porous secondary, and a linebacker group that’s mostly comprised of dudes signed off the street — showed some spunk at the exact moment it needed to Sunday.
The Lions — and the Raiders defense — were on the Oakland 8-yard line with 50 seconds remaining in regulation Sunday. Overtime seemed inevitable.
But the Raiders picked up a big sack from P.J. Hall to push the Lions back to the 14-yard line and then saw arguably their two biggest scapegoats — defensive end and No. 4 overall pick Clelin Ferrel and safety Karl Joseph — combine to make a game-winning play on fourth-and-goal at the 1-yard line. Ferrel pressured Stafford, who tried to roll left off play-action, and Joseph, climbing a ladder in the back of the end zone, reached around tight end Logan Thomas to break up the pass.
Don’t get it twisted — this Raiders defense isn’t good. It probably won’t be good until well after the team moves to Las Vegas. But in the pass-happy, offense-first NFL in 2019, that might not matter. So long as a defense is opportunistic, it can play.
And the Raiders showed they at least have the capability of being that against the Lions.
Perhaps this is a fleeting moment of optimism — something that will be squashed in a matter of hours — but if the Raiders can carry their play from Sunday forward to Thursday night and beat the Chargers at the Coliseum, this team is going to be off to the races, with games against the NFL’s two worst teams — the Bengals and Jets — to close out November.
It’s not even close to a stretch to think that the Raiders could go into December with a 7-4 record.
And in this year’s AFC, it’ll probably only take nine wins to make the postseason.
So hop on the bandwagon now — there might not be room come Friday.