It’s safe to say in the past few years the Raiders have allowed losses to stack up late in the season and for the season to get away from them. Derek Carr often talks about how this season is different. And when I say “often” I mean every season. Likewise he talks about how the previous seasons (when he had previously said it was different, mind you) players would let the losses get to them.
With the team’s three-game losing streak, it had very much the same feeling of ‘here we go again’ as the past few seasons in which the Raiders started hot and faded down the stretch.
Then, the Raiders went to Dallas and beat a very good Cowboys team.
Now, just as with the losses, the Raiders must be careful. But this time they must be careful not to think they accomplished something and don’t still have issues that need to be addressed.
Interim head coach Rich Bisaccia met with the team this week about making sure this team doesn’t get too high on themselves.
“The loss, we didn’t get so down that we couldn’t go out there and keep preparing and we couldn’t go out there and have really good, crisp, physical practices. And now that we’ve won, we just have to be careful,” Bisaccia said Monday. “What I told them was, I think when you win a game you have to be careful with the win masking your problems. When you lose a game, you pick at every single thing that happens in the loss. When you win a game, sometimes the tendency is to maybe skim over the things that you didn’t do well and kind of move on to what’s next. So, I think we have to do a good job as coaches to look at the things we really didn’t do well although we won the game, just like we would if we lost it. So, we are going to try to do that. We are going to try to have enough self-confidence where we can be self-critical. Not only as coaches but as players as well.”
One would hope that wouldn’t be a tough concept. After all, the Raiders needed overtime to beat a Cowboys team missing both of their starting receivers. And they shower of flags by the officials often hurt the Raiders while also sometimes helping them. Nothing about that game should give them a reason to feel overconfident.
Another way to help guard against being too low after a loss or high after a win is simply to look around the league. As Derek Carr noted Wednesday.
“You look at any of the really good teams, especially in the AFC, there’s a big old cluster around the same record in the AFC. Everyone’s had a lot of good days and a lot of teams have had some bad days, some really good football teams,” said Carr. “So, it happens in our league. I think the main thing is that you try your best to stay even-keeled and trust the process that you’re going about. You’re always trying to improve your process and what I mean by that is the day-to-day and the every week grind from when the game is over until you kick off the next one. That process.”
Just the AFC West alone is anyone’s season. With the Chiefs atop the division at 7-4 and the other three teams at 6-5.
As far as issues, the run game still struggles with consistency, the offensive line is still the weak link and commits far too many penalties, and they’ve shown that if the pass rush isn’t on point, the entire defense falls apart. Nothing is a given with this team.
The week the Raiders are preparing for Washington. A team that sits at 5-6, a game different than the Raiders. Whatever it takes for the Raiders to not think beating the 7-3 Cowboys means they can shift into cruise control against Washington they need to use to avoid anything resembling a trap.
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