The Morning After: Raiders hit rock bottom in awful performance against Seahawks

Well, that wasn’t fun. It’s strange when a 27-3 beatdown was actually much worse than the final score would have you believe. The offensive line completely imploded, the running game was non existent, the passing game was unable to connect anything past 5 yards for most of the game, the corners were getting bested even when they were in good position, the punting was atrocious and the pass rush was absolutely terrible.

Everything about the Oakland Raiders loss to the Seattle Seahawks was bad, there was not one bright spot in the entire game. It’s crazy because as an eternal optimist I usually can come up with a few things even in terrible games to point to. I have nothing here, this game was absolutely pathetic.

This was one of Derek Carr’s worst games of his career. He finished 23-31, which doesn’t sound that bad until you finish the sentence by saying for 142 yards. That’s an average completion of just 6.17 yards, and yards per attempt of just 4.58. He also had two strip fumbles, though no interceptions this game. The 2nd fumble he just straight up dropped the ball out of surprise though when Kolton Miller got rolled backward into him from being obliterated as soon as the ball was snapped.

The horrible game that Carr had does come with an asterisk because of how bad the offensive line was, especially the rookie tackles.. You shouldn’t expect much if the QB has such little time to even throw the ball. Still, his lack of pocket awareness is simply astounding. He is a statue that refuses to use his legs to get away from the pressure until it’s entirely too late.

It’s astounding how Carr refuses to use his legs when he actually has a fair amount of athletic ability, he could make such a difference by running if he would just be willing to do it. When you watch Aaron Rodgers play he is absolutely extraordinary at setting up pass rushers to open holes for him to sneak through to get extra time and he also is great at taking off when nothing else is open.

Derek Carr is the polar opposite of that, he doesn’t have any understanding of how to maneuver out of pressure and he utterly refuses to scramble. Until he figures out that he can’t just stay in a collapsing pocket his game is going to continue to suffer. That is only exaggerated by the struggles of the two rookie tackles now.

It seemed like every other play Kolton Miller was doing something awful, this would be a game for him to forget if it wasn’t so important to learn from all the mistakes he made. He was just plain awful all day long but his attempt to recover the first strip sack on Carr was hilariously bad. There is no excuse to not recover that ball, he was the only person even close to it but he flopped directly on top of it and let it skirt out from under him. I guarantee he had the longest flight home out of anybody on the team.

It also didn’t help when the Raiders best receiver got knocked out by one of the worst headshots that you will ever see go not flagged. What was the ref even looking at when Amari Cooper got lit up and concussed out of the game? You have players being called for roughing the passer for breathing on a QB, but a defenseless wide receiver in the middle of the field gets straight up knocked out with a head shot and nothing gets called? Unbelievable.

Then you have Gareon Conley not even get a single defensive snap in one of the most one sided games ever. I get that Jon Gruden considers him to be a rookie but that is just terrible coaching. There is no possible way that Conley deserved to be treated like that, he didn’t deserve to only play 13 snaps last week and he sure as hell didn’t deserve to not get a single one this week.

This team is full on into rebuilding mode and that means that the inexperienced players should be playing the most, not the least. Why not let Conley have a shot against a great QB, the Seahawks were doing whatever they wanted anyway. Let the kid play and get experience so maybe he won’t be like a full on rookie again next season. There is absolutely no excuse on that, none.

The best part to come now is that the Raiders have a bye week to sort this shit show out as best they can, though I’ve rarely had less faith in that happening than I do right now. Actually, now that I think about it the best part of the bye coming right now is that we get a week long break of the agony of watching this team’s death spasm in the first year of Gruden 2.0.

Enjoy the week off everybody, hopefully Gruden manages to put a team on the field worth watching when the Raiders come back from the Bye week. They will be playing the Indianapolis Colts at home when they do return to the field so it will be against a fellow 1-5 team that thought they had a Franchise QB but now don’t know what they have anymore.

No matter what, rebuilding or not, the Raiders can not have another game like this one when they do return from their bye. This was a nightmare game in every single aspect, it should be the type of game where there’s nowhere to go but up. This has to be their rock bottom because it can’t hardly get worse than the product they put on the field yesterday.

If they somehow do worse than this then they will have hit rock bottom so hard in this game that they pulverized the rock and kept falling.