Remember late last season? If you’re a Raiders fan, I can understand if you’d rather not, but if you’ll recall, despite the Raiders losing five of their final six games, the Raiders weren’t eliminated from the playoffs until the final game of the season.
That was a highly unusual situation, requiring several of the teams who were also vying for playoff spots to lose in order to keep the Raiders in it.
Currently, the Raiders are not among the playoff seeds. But they still control their own destiny. Whether that continues is dependent upon whether they can beat the Colts this weekend.
“[W]e’re in a single-elimination mindset,” said Derek Carr.
He’s right, you know. The playoffs basically start Sunday for the Raiders as they will need to try and pull even with the 8-4 Colts who currently hold the seventh and final playoff spot in the AFC, while the Raiders hold the 8th seed, one spot outside of the bubble.
“[I]f we don’t win this game, it doesn’t mean anything,” Carr continued. “We have our work cut out for us against one of the best teams in the NFL. They’ve had some close losses and we’ve had some close games. But when you turn that tape on, it just jumps out to you how good they are. We got to bring it, we got to be ready to play because if not, they’ll come and run us out of our own stadium. As much as I’d love to get ahead and think about those things, it doesn’t matter if we don’t take care of business.”
Should the Raiders lose this game against the Colts, they would no longer control their own destiny. This means they could win the final three games and still miss the playoffs.
And that isn’t some far-fetched scenario either. It’s quite plausible should the Raiders lose this game against the Colts that even winning out wouldn’t be enough.
Should the Raiders lose this Sunday, the teams they would need to surpass in the playoff hunt to get back into the race are the Colts, who would then have to lose their last three for the Raiders to overtake them, the Browns, who need only beat the Giants and Jets to get in, the Titans, who only face one winning team the rest of the way and currently own the tiebreaker over the Colts to win the AFC South, and the Bills, who would pretty much have to lose out the season not to get in.
So, yeah, a single-elimination mindset is the only mindset right now.
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