Oakland Raiders: 5 takeaways from Week 1 victory over the Denver Broncos

5. Jon Gruden took his foot off the gas pedal

As I said earlier, the score looked closer than the game really was and that is mostly due to Gruden and the offense taking their foot off the pedal on a couple of drives.

The Raiders did come away with a touchdown on their third to last drive and a field goal on their second to last drive, but there were drives prior to that where a short pass was called on third down as if they were fine with settling to punt and letting the defense hold.

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For a team that has been pretty much bad every year for 20 years with the exception of 2016, the Raiders have been blown out a lot in recent years. So I don’t understand why the coaches the team have acquired in recent years never decide to run up the score every once in a while

It isn’t something that the Raiders ever really have had the opportunity to do, even in that great 2016 season as many of those games came down to the wire.

While the running game was good, Jacobs ended up with an average yard per carry of just 3.7 and that’s because of all the extra carries he got when the team was seemingly trying to run the clock out when they should have stayed aggressive and put the Broncos out.

Carr looked as good as ever and so I feel the team should have stayed aggressive through the air all the way throughout.

At the end of the day, the team came away with a win, so you can’t complain too much.

But at the same time, the Raiders may not be able to get away with becoming conservative when they face tougher teams like the Chiefs who they will be battling next week in Oakland.