Raiders Manage to Play Without Derek Carr, but Only Barely
DENVER — The craziest thing happened at Sports Authority Field on Sunday. The Oakland Raiders slipped on their pads, donned their uniforms and summoned the fortitude to play. It was a lot for them after having lost quarterback Derek Carr to a broken leg last week, but since his backup, Matt McGloin, was available, the Raiders figured they might as well give this football thing another try.
The outcome, a 24-6 loss to the Denver Broncos, corroborated all that the Raiders had tried to dispel over the past week, after Carr’s injury had ruined his superlative season, upended the A.F.C. hierarchy and dampened a renaissance delayed by years of mismanagement and futility.
What had been an opportunity for the Raiders to prove that they could compartmentalize and that their defense and running game could bolster McGloin and mitigate Carr’s absence instead devolved into a teamwide malfunction. In the first half, Oakland managed three first downs, ceded 255 yards — a ghastly 7.7 per play — and committed nine penalties.
The Raiders enter the playoffs as a team severely compromised, their league-leading seven Pro Bowlers be damned. One of those, of course, was Carr, who had guided Oakland to its first playoff berth since a loss in the Super Bowl in 2002.
The next 13 seasons passed with the Raiders never winning more than eight games, never finishing higher than third in the four-team A.F.C. West. This season, buttressed by Carr, Oakland rampaged to 12 victories, positioning itself, with a win Sunday, for a division title, a first-round bye and — not insignificantly for a team facing potential relocation to Las Vegas — a home playoff game.
But this defeat, coupled with Kansas City’s victory in San Diego, dropped the Raiders to the No. 5 seed, sending them to Houston next weekend with their quarterback situation in flux again.
McGloin played four drives, all resulting in punts, before leaving with a shoulder injury. On three consecutive plays in the second quarter, he overthrew receivers, including Amari Cooper, who almost certainly would have scored a long touchdown.
McGloin’s replacement, Connor Cook, lost a fumble that resulted in a touchdown that widened Oakland’s deficit to 24-0. He later found Cooper on a 32-yard touchdown that was cosmetic.
The cold calculus of the N.F.L. devalues its players, who subscribe to that hackneyed next-man-up mantra. They would never say that not having a marquee player devastates their prospects because that would reveal weakness, would demonstrate disrespect to that next man up.
Such as McGloin, who had not started in three seasons. Or Cook, who had not appeared in a game before Sunday.
Other playoff-bound teams have lost quarterbacks to injury, but Oakland, without Carr, is in an exceptional situation. As Adam Schefter of ESPN posted on Twitter last week, and as the Elias Sports Bureau later confirmed, Carr will be the only quarterback to win at least 12 regular-season games and not start in the postseason.
From an emotional standpoint at least, the 2005 Bengals could empathize. Like these Raiders, Cincinnati had not reached the playoffs in more than a decade, and when that day came, after a 15-year wait, quarterback Carson Palmer blew out his knee on the second offensive play.
“As much as you say you have faith,” the former Bengals receiver T. J. Houshmandzadeh said in a telephone interview, “it affects you.”
The 1990 Giants may be a model for Oakland, considering the circumstances. The Giants were 11-3 when quarterback Phil Simms went on injured reserve with a foot injury and was replaced by Jeff Hostetler, who led them to five consecutive victories and a Super Bowl win over Buffalo.
But even then, there is an important distinction. The Giants’ offense accentuated their rushing game, not their quarterback.
“We played three tight ends and went to heavy packages when we were in the game just to beat you down physically,” Howard Cross, a tight end on that team, said in an interview last week at Giants headquarters in East Rutherford, N.J. “Third and 2 or 3, we’re running. You throw the ball to get the first down, too many bad things could happen.”
The propagation of spread offenses transformed the N.F.L. into a passing league, and that evolution has put more of an onus on quarterbacks. Carr embraced that responsibility, throwing 28 touchdowns to six interceptions and engineering seven fourth-quarter comeback victories.
That resilience can permeate a team, the expectation that the quarterback can compensate for deficiencies elsewhere — a struggling defense, for instance — and will it to victory.
The Raiders, after trailing by 17 points at halftime, needed one of those revivals Sunday. They will need much more than that next week.
“The one thing about this team is enough players in that locker room know what it’s like to lose, what it’s like to pack their bags in January and head home, and have been around a building that hasn’t been a pleasant place to be around the last several years,” Rich Gannon, the last quarterback to play for Oakland in the postseason and now an analyst for CBS, said in a telephone interview last week. “They don’t want to go back to that.”
Unless the Raiders regroup, they might not have a choice.
P.C:http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/01/sports/football/oakland-raiders-denver-broncos.html
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