The Oakland Raiders open their first home game in high fashion as they beat the Jacksonville Jaguars for Terrelle Pryor's first win as an NFL QB starter and to put Dennis Allen at .500 for the first time as a head coach.
Let's start off with the positives, the running game and the defense. Darren McFadden breaks open his first 100+ yards game for the 2013 season and torches the Jacksonville defense. Credit all goes to the offensive line, the first time I can gladly say that our O-line played well in the run game, creating all kinds of holes for McFadden and back up running back Rashad Jennings, also especially creating that big hole for Marcel Reece to run for the go ahead TD. The defense, we got banged up early in the game and certainly Tyvon Branch's injury hurts, hopefully MRI tests are negative and gets back on the field soon. Other than that, the defense came out flying, giving Chad Henne and the Jaguars offense all kinds of trouble and certainly Charles Woodson turned back the clock in his regular season return, 37 years of age and can still make explosive plays and that TD saving tackle on MJD was nice.
On the limbo, I wouldn't analyze too much, but it's obvious that the receiving corps is on the limbo. They didn't do too much until Rod Streater and rookie tight end, Mychal Rivera started making plays when it matters, so the receiving corps gets a pass, but they have to step up more, no pun intended, especially Denarius Moore, who has fallen off the #1 Wide Receiver conversation.
Big negative though, the red zone offense. Aside from the Marcel Reece TD run, the red zone offense kinda sucked after, but I've seen a lot of stalled red zone drives in my tenure as a Raider fan so I think it's natural that it's a big problem. We had 3 red zone opportunities to blow this game wide open, but a lot of ticky tack plays in trying to get into the end zone and we gotta improve on that instead of relying on Sebass to negate the stalled drive. He missed a 32 yard chip shot early in the game and that shows that the red zone offense needs to step up especially when we have Denver coming up on the road.
Like I said in my Quarter-by-Quarter reaction, I'll take the win, it's not a great win, but it still a win regardless. We got a tough test heading into high altitude against Denver and it'll be likely that Peyton Manning will find every way to pick our defense apart. As long as we compete and keep him off the field, we can make this divisional game a lot closer as opposed to how many experts see it.
No comments:
Post a Comment