Oakland Raiders: The good, bad, and ugly from week five loss to Chargers
By Kevin Saito
Good: Ummmmm…
Well, this one should be brief. Basically, there was no good that came out of Oakland’s game against the Chargers. Zero. Zip. Nada.
Usually, in a loss, even if it requires you really looking hard, and turning over every stone, you can find some small strand of good. Some small moral victory, or silver lining.
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This isn’t one of those games.
The Raiders came out flat, their first five-play drive ending in a punt. Their only real promising drive of the half – that took them all the way down to the Chargers five-yard line, disappointingly enough, ended with a field goal.
The Raiders had some nice moments throughout the game with Los Angeles, but they always managed to counteract those good moments, with mind-numbingly stupid ones. Whenever they were building momentum, or seemed to be gaining a head of steam, a penalty, a sack, a fumble, or some equally infuriating play would blunt that momentum, forcing the team to either punt it away, or turn it over outright.
The running game was bad – unfortunately, because the Raiders were down so big, so early, they never got a chance to properly use the ground game. The passing game was equally as bad – don’t let Derek Carr‘s numbers fool you, he was horribly ineffective against LA. And the special teams were anything but.
Football is a team sport, as they say, and this utter collapse and failure, was most definitely a group, combined effort.