It’s the final quarter of the season now. Few NFL teams are at full strength. Most have lost a key player or a few. Some are able to weather those losses and overcome it. The Raiders are not one of those teams.
On Friday, they figured they’d be taking the field with Josh Jacobs just as they had all season long. There was no reason to think they wouldn’t. Jacobs said he’s been playing with a broken shoulder, but that happened week seven in Green Bay, and he helped carry the Raiders to three wins since then with four games over 100 yards rushing.
Come the day of the game, trouble was brewing. Suddenly Jacobs was being considered a game-time decision and at pregame, he wasn’t even on the field warming up. He would be inactive for the game.
Suddenly the Raiders offense was losing their top offensive weapon. I asked Gruden how much the team missed Jacobs in this game.
“Probably a lot,” Gruden responded. “He’s a great player. I’m not going to discredit what DeAndre [Washington] and Jalen [Richard] did. I thought they did an excellent job. They are good players, but Jacobs is our feature back.”
The Jacobs loss came on the heels of the team losing right tackle Trent Brown to a pectoral muscle injury.
It’s kind of hard to convincingly blame the Raiders’ struggles on those two injuries. The offense hadn’t scored a meaningful touchdown in the two weeks prior, so even with Jacobs and Brown on the field, the offense wasn’t doing anything.
Another area you could point is the receiving corps, which has been the most troubled unit on the team all season long. First with the Antonio Brown debacle, then JJ Nelson and Ryan Grant not panning out, then the underwhelming acquisitions of Trevor Davis and Zay Jones, the loss of Hunter Renfrow to a broken rib, and early in the third quarter of this game Foster Moreau was added to the list.
Moreau hurt his knee on the Raiders’ second-half opening drive and was quickly ruled out of the game. Gruden said after the game that Moreau’s injury is potentially season-ending.
But still, we’re talking about a team that not only hasn’t put up a lot of points, but gives up a lot of points. That falls on the defense as well. Sunday in particular, the Raiders defense gave up 35 points. And the final touchdown was scored with nearly the entire fourth quarter still to play.
The Titans had over 552 yards of offense in the game with the damage happening through the air and on the ground. The two big injuries for the team are at the safety positions with Johnathan Abram lost after the opener and Karl Joseph lost three weeks ago. But Erik Harris has played quite well in place of Abram and the team signed DJ Swearinger to replace Joseph. Again, that doesn’t seem like enough to explain just how bad this defense has been.
The players tend to use the same cliche “lack of execution” and “everybody just needs to do their job” lines to avoid giving any actual specific reasons for what’s going wrong. After all, most other answers would either call out their teammates or call out their coaches and no one wants to do that.
As for the injuries thing, that could be seen as an excuse, so instead the non-answer is to just say “nobody cares.” That’s Tahir Whitehead said it and so did Derek Carr.
Gruden is a bit more willing to call upon the injuries, or in the case of Vontaze Burfict, the suspension, for the reasons behind the struggles. That’s much easier than saying it was a scheme thing which would fall on him or defensive coordinator Paul Guenther, or that the team is just not good enough which would be trashing his players.
Instead, he sees similarities to what the now cross-bay Warriors are experiencing.
“We’re missing some of the players that helped us win those three straight games,” said Gruden. “The Golden State Warriors are going through a similar process. It’s no as easy to win when you’re not playing with your frontline guys. It works out for the development of some young players, but it’s on me. It’s my responsibility to fix it and it certainly doesn’t look good the last few weeks.”
Basketball is a very different animal when it comes to losing key players. With only five players on the court at any given time, and probably as many at three stars, losing any of them can affect a team greatly. The only player on a football field that usually has that kind of impact is the quarterback and the Raiders have not been without Derek Carr at all this season. And the Warriors proved themselves to be great before their string of injuries. The Raiders have not.
Injuries can affect teams, that is true. Even if it isn’t the quarterback. Good teams can overcome them. Marginal teams with depth can overcome it. The Raiders at this point are a marginal team without a lot of depth. They are still trying to find their way and uncover some reliable stars. They have some hopefuls and some proven among them. Some of whom were on the sideline Sunday. They may have made today a little less of a blowout, but difficult to suggest they would have saved the day.
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