Oakland Raiders Schedule Release: 6 Games The Team Should Circle Now

Dec 21, 2014; Oakland, CA, USA; Oakland Raiders receiver

(89) runs onto the field through a procession of cheerleaders before the game against the Buffalo Bills at O.co Coliseum. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

Well, it’s not nearly as exciting as the NFL Draft is sure to be, but Oakland Raiders’ fans, like fans everywhere, cleared an important milestone on the way to the 2015 season – the release of the 2015 schedule.

Leave it to the NFL to somehow turn a non-event into a big event. Its not like we haven’t know the identities of Oakland’s 2015 opponents for months now. The only thing we didn’t know was the order of the games and the dates on which those games would be played.

And now we do.

Thanks to a probably drawn out longer than necessary marketing process that included teasers posted on Twitter, the NFL release the schedule of every team in the league, to the delight of football fans everywhere. It’s been almost like Christmas around the internet.

But once the giddiness of that shiny, new present wears off, fans will have to sit down and confront the grim reality of the schedule facing their favorite team. For the Raider faithful, this is an almost annual rite of passage – sitting down, reviewing the schedule, and concluding that the league shafted the Silver and Black once again.

For the second straight year, the Raiders will have a strength of schedule inside the top ten in the league – they have the seventh toughest schedule to be exact. But you have to play who is put in front of you, and if the Raiders do hope to scratch and claw their way back to respectability – with the end goal of getting back to prominence – in the league, they’re going to have to play, and beat, the best teams in the NFL. Which is no easy task, to be sure.

Obviously, once the regular season starts, every game matters. When the difference between making the playoffs or going home at the end of the regular season can sometimes come down to a single game, every game is important.

The Raiders are going to go out and try to beat every team put in front of them. While a perfect season is highly unlikely, it doesn’t hurt to dream big, right? The hope for Raider fans is that Oakland can somehow manage to win more than they lose this season. A non-losing season would be a great start, and would mean the world to the long suffering Oakland fan base.

With that in mind, here are six games that, while they have no special importance over any of the other games on the 2015 slate, can serve as valuable benchmarks and measuring sticks for how the team is faring, and whether the Raiders are indeed clawing their way back toward respectability, or are continuing to circle the bowl.

With the release of the 2015 schedule, here are six games the Raiders should already have circled on their calendars.

Next: Opening Week Matchup