It’s hard enough in this league to move the ball down the field in ten-yard increments. Sunday the Raiders found themselves having to pick up 15 yards on several instances because of false starts. Jack Del Rio is NOT happy about it.
“Yeah, that’s the biggest one,” Del Rio said of pre-snap penalties. “The judgment calls that can go either way, you’re going to be a competitive team, a team that plays really hard, you’re going to have some of those. Over the year, they tend to balance out. The pre-snap penalties, don’t have a lot of patience for those. We have zero tolerance for those. We’ve got to clean those up. Pre-snap penalties get me going there.”
Adding to his frustrations is the fact that this was a home game. Some false starts are expected on the road with the crowd noise. So, there’s no excuse for the Raiders to have had four false starts while the Chargers had just one.
It’s just the Raiders’ second home game of the season. They had two false starts against the Falcons in week two while the Falcons had just one.
Against the Chargers, the false starts proved costly. Two of them came on the same drive in the first quarter -- first by Rodney Hudson and the second by Donald Penn. They picked up 14 yards on the series, but due to the ten yards lost, they ended up lining up bringing Sebastian Janikowski for a 50-yard field goal attempt that missed wide right.
The other two false starts also came on the same drive in the third quarter. Both were by Kelechi Osemele. The Raiders overcame the first one, but couldn’t overcome the second which came on third and three. They settled for a 48-yard field goal; this one was good, to pull to within five at 24-19.
Having zero fourth quarter penalties which no doubt helped them to be able to score another 15 points and win the game.
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