Oakland Raiders: Top 5 takeaways from Week 5 victory over the Chicago Bears

4. Derek Carr cracked under pressure

As nice as it would be to only focus on the positive trends that we’ve been seeing, it’s hard to ignore the negative ones.

While the Raiders have established themselves as being a team that can jump ahead early, they’ve also fostered a concerning habit of letting a single quarter get away from them.

This hasn’t been a matter of a couple ugly plays, but a complete meltdown that starts because of something small and quickly devolves into a 28-point quarter by the Kansas City Chiefs or a 21-point quarter by the Chicago Bears.

What should have been a second-half where the Raiders could coast into the finish line and their Week 6 bye turned into something that threatened to steal a win away from the Silver and Black.

Up 17-0 with just over 13 minutes left in the third quarter, Carr dropped back and pitched the ball toward Jacobs in a total miscue, resulting in the ball being chucked back to about the Oakland 15-yard line.

The Bears were able to recover it and promptly kickstarted their attempt at a comeback.

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It’s tough to say exactly what happened on this play, but it looks like another classic miscommunication with Carr at the helm. Jacobs certainly could have attempted to dive on the ball instead of scooping it, but it was a bad play altogether.

Miscommunications are to be expected, but what came next was a complete meltdown from Carr. He reverted back to the lesser version of himself where he plays timid and is sapped of any ability to be a leader.

The team reflected that frustration as the Bears continued to mount their own momentum. Penalty flags flew. Derek Carr began to come across more and more visibly upset.

It was ugly.

If it weren’t for the drive by the Raiders in the fourth quarter, Carr would have had a lot of questions to answer about his leadership in tense moments.

In a span of about 14 minutes, the Bears put up three touchdowns and even secured a Trevor Davis fumble at the goal line to make members of Raider Nation want to pull the last strands of their hair out.

There are other leaders on the team that can bring the team together when facing that kind of adversity, but to see Carr sink into himself under the pressure of the moment is an all-too-familiar song that fans should be tired of hearing.

It was another week where Carr put up decent numbers, but the concerns about him still exist.

Is he worth it moving forward? Through five weeks, the jury is still out.

But it’s not a good sign when the team’s leader has shown consistent fragility.