Oakland Raiders: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly Vs. Tennessee Titans

The Ugly – The Laundry Keeps Flying

With another eight penalty flags on the day, the Raiders have taken over sole possession of first place in the race for the penalty flag title. It’s not just D.J. Hayden who racks up flags, it’s actually the whole team.

With 31 accepted penalties on their resume, the Raiders now stand two ahead of Jacksonville and Detroit. And they’ve given up 257 penalty yards on those 31 penalties.

Oh yeah, they’ve also had five other penalties declined, meaning they’ve actually been flagged a whopping 36 times – 12 per game.

We’ve seen penalties do some real damage to the Raiders this season. An absolute mental blunder by Amari Cooper wiped out a game tying touchdown against Atlanta and helped change the entire complexion of that game. Against the Titans, another touchdown was wiped out by a holding call on Donald Penn.

In addition to taking points off the board, we’ve seen a number of sometimes promising looking drives killed because of penalties.

This was a trend many of us saw forming in the preseason and one we sounded the warning bells about. Most of us were scoffed at, with the explanation that it was preseason and most of the penalties were being committed by guys who wouldn’t be on the roster long.

Well, here we are, three weeks into the regular season and the penalty issues only seems to have gotten worse.

The Raiders are drawing 12 flags a game and giving up nearly a football field in penalty yardage (86 yards per contest).

This isn’t an issue that can be laughed off and it’s not one that should be ignored. The sheer number of penalties being drawn (many of them pre-snap and simple mental gaffes) is overwhelming. They will continue to do damage to this team – and very well could cost them more games down the line.