The Morning After: Raiders at Chiefs

It’s a fitting end to a terrible season to have been blown out in the final week by the arch rival Kansas City Chiefs. Why not. No reason to end this bad of a year on a high note, might as well just get completely embarrassed on the way out the door one last time.

Thankfully, that was the last loss the Oakland Raiders will incur in 2018. With the Chiefs having the AFC West championship and number 1 seed to play for there wasn’t really a doubt on what the final outcome of that game was going to be. The only real question was whether the Raiders would play competitively but that was answered emphatically with a hell no.

To start out this game with 4 straight turnovers on offense, that is just inexcusable even at the worst of times. Not only was it ridiculous to have that many turnovers in the beginning of a game, they were absolutely absurd ways to turn the ball over.

The first fumble from Doug Martin had him basically not even paying attention to the ball in the middle of a gang tackle. The first interception from Derek Carr was thrown to Jared Cook who went full zombie mode just clueless to the fact he was in a real NFL game at that moment. After that was Carr’s 7^th strip sack fumble of the season, and lastly Carr threw his 2^nd interception of the game right up the middle into a crowd of players in what had to have been a route mix up or else was the worst play designed in NFL history.

The kicker is that the team knew that horrible turnovers had already cost them the upset over the Chiefs the first time they played, and their response was apparently that they felt they needed to one up the first performance. “We can do worst then that! Let’s give it to ‘em!” is what I imagine they must have yelled as leaving the locker room for this performance, because to think that product on the field was the result of them trying NOT to turn the ball over just makes my head hurt.

By the time the dust settled the game was already out of hand, no team is coming back from a start like that in the NFL. The worst part of all though was that they were moving the ball well each drive until each horrendous turnover eventually happened. It was straight up bizarre, the second they got near midfield or passed it then they turned the ball over. The first fumble happened at the Oakland 48, all three of the others happened on the Kansas City side of the field.

If not for those turnovers, this could have actually been a decent game but instead they just got completely annihilated by the biggest rival they have. It would have been awesome to see the Raiders play spoiler to the Chiefs and knock them from the 1st seed to the 5th seed. It would have been glorious to watch as they snatched the bye week from right out of those ketchup and mustard hands, but instead they rolled over and started the off-season early despite having one game left on the schedule.

Oh well, at least they didn’t fall any further in the draft boards and thankfully this season is completely over now for real and not just metaphorically. Now the off-season begins and the Raiders no longer have to care about what their record says. Back to 0-0, with three first round draft picks and copious amounts of cap space to reinvigorate this team with new talent.

Apparently they also will now have a new GM to handle some of those new talent additions as well, welcome aboard to Mike Mayock (reportedly). I’m not altogether sure about adding a rookie GM to the mix, but it’s Jon Gruden’s team anyway and I definitely have always respected Mayock’s draft acumen. Let’s just hope him and Chucky are a good fit together, because this is now the tandem that will be leading this Raiders team for the foreseeable future.

It will be interesting to watch what these two manage to do to reshape the franchise this off-season, far more interesting than the season that the Raiders just put out there was anyway. Now if they would just decide on where all these new players will be playing next year and get that pesky little not having a stadium to play in issue taken care of, that’d be great.

Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, San Antonio or London. Where ever they end up playing, let’s make sure not to have any more blow out losses like this game to the Kansas City Chiefs. Even after all these years of losing during the dark days, it never gets easier watching the Chiefs get to celebrate while the Raiders head back home to clean out their lockers.

Hopefully we will at least get to celebrate another 1 and done playoffs for Kansas City. The football gods owe us that much at the very least after this horrid 2018 season.