Loud N' Proud by Blitzchick
The Numbers Tell the Tale...
The Raiders went down to defeat 24-16 as the squared off against the San Diego Chargers down in QualComm Stadium. But there’s more to this defeat than meets the eye.
This was a game of inches, yards and numbers. Mostly numbers.
One of the biggest things the numbers tell us? The Raiders had chances to take this game.
They were in the red zone twice, but came away with only one touch down. That would have put us 4 points closer to the Chargers score.
JaMarcus Russell showed one of his many weaknesses again as his attempted to throw deep to Zach Miller in triple coverage. This was a recipe for disaster. For the second time in as many games, Russell turned the ball over on the Raiders opening drive. This one went to Antonio Cromartie. I will allow that there was a slight hold (uncalled) on Zach during his route, but the ball was still thrown into triple coverage. At the time I thought it was a stupid decision. Then I figured it was rather *censored*y for a guy that has more interceptions than touch down receptions. I went a step further and decided it was downright asinine to attempt that throw. I am beginning to think that Russell is color blind to boot.
Riding the wave of the tide, Phillip Rivers took 2 plays to get in the end zone. The first play was a huge 53 yard pass to the 6'5", 225 lb. Malcolm Floyd. Michael Huff , defending the play, was giving up 4 inches and 20 lbs to Floyd. The mismatch would be a lot to overcome to begin with, but add in the arm bar by Floyd to keep Huff down as Floyd jumped for the ball proved to be too much for Huff. Basically , that arm bar took Huff’s chances of defending that pass from slim to none.
The following 6 yard run by LaDanian Tomlinson capped the “drive”, and the Chargers were up 7-0 with less than 4 minutes gone in the game.
Thank you, JaMarcus Russell for turning the ball over again on the opening drive. Note to Coach Cable : please defer the next coin toss win. PLEASE. For as long as we are hanging on to the ball in opening drives, we may as well just give them first shot offensively. It beats the hell out of giving them the ball at the beginning of the first and second half.
But at least this time the ball wasn’t on our 4 yard line.
But that brings up another point.
The defense had plenty of room to defend the score this time.
They gave up several big plays in this game.
There were 4 plays of 20 yards or more in the air. Vincent Jackson, known for his spiked ball not being a fumble because of the way it bounced, averaged almost 13 yards a reception for his 8 catches. This included one of 20 yards. Antonio Gates had 3 receptions for 49 yards, including one for 30 yards. Malcolm Floyd had the reception for 53 yards, plus 2 others for another 11 yards combined. Chris Chambers had one reception for 20 yards.
In 4 receptions that’s a total of 123 yards. That’s 14 more yards than JaMarcus Russell had all game.
By the time the game clock showed 0:00, Rivers had completed 16 passes out of 25 attempts for a total of 249 yards. Including the 1 sack and 1 interception, he ended up with a 93.6 QB rating. Very respectable.
JaMarcus Russell didn’t fare so well. He completed 14 passes out of 22 attempts, but his total yards was less than half of what Rivers racked up. His 109 yards is what one may expect in high school game. He connected 5 times with Zach Miller, with a long of 15 yards. One of those misses was the interception, the other just another overthrow. Fargas had 3 receptions with a long of 11 yards. One of these receptions Fargas was absolutely popped because Russell led him into the defender rather than away from him, another Russell specialty. Darrius Heyward-Bay had one reception for 10 yards. Those were the 3 longest pass plays. Hardly anything to strike the fear in the hearts of any defensive players, is it? Russell didn’t connect once out of his 3 attempts to Louis Murphy. One of these tosses included a poorly thrown ball that would have been good for a first down if the ball hadn’t been thrown to Russell’s second favorite target, the turf.
So far this season, he has had three favorite targets : Zach Miller, the turf and the opposing team.
Anyone thinking I am being too rough on him? Think about this. How many of his passes were drops to day? One, possibly. Of the 2 misses intended for Miller , as I mentioned above, one was an interception, the other a bad pass. Johnnie Lee Higgins was targeted 4 times. The first one was a the short pass that was incomplete. I can’t recall what happened, but I don’t have it as a drop. Just incomplete. One was out of bounds on purpose. Johnnie and another receiver had help knocking each other down. The guys in the booth said something about how there was a bump by a defender which means illegal contact. Regardless, Russell tossed it away. Johnnie Lee caught one. The last one, Johnnie wasn’t really open. In desperation on the 4th down play, I think Johnnie tried to bat the ball to Darrius Heyward-Bey. Sort of a volley ball type pass. It didn’t work and that was our last offensive play of the game. There were 3 passes intended for Murphy. We already talked about the one in the turf. One Russell was hit as he threw. The ball was still too far out for Murphy to get in bounds. The other pass was another poor decision trying to get the ball to Murphy in triple coverage. Murphy had to go to being the defensive player, it seemed to me. Ok, to be honest it was probably double coverage when the throw was made, but as usual, the ball came in late allowing the third defender to come over.
Let’s face it folks , so far, JaMarcus Russell has not been able to hold up the reasoning for the Raiders drafting him. The idea was to be able to throw deep. He has trouble being accurate, he’s throwing too late and there are times he’s just hanging the ball up there. Yet on his shorter passes, he throws with such velocity the ball is difficult to catch. He has no touch. He still hasn’t been able to figure out how to read coverages. He is finally getting to throw underneath, and he did make several connections, all mostly shorter passes, but we need that accuracy on the deep ball to back the defensive backs off and keep them honest. If he can’t connect with a wide open receiver deep, the defensive backs won’t bother covering, or they’ll just cover the deep man knowing there’s a very good chance the ball will be poorly thrown and the possibility of an interception is great.
I want him to succeed, I try to will him to succeed during games. But the problem is all the wanting everywhere by all the fans, his team mates and his coaches won’t do any good unless Russell himself wants it bad enough. I question that.
Time for more talk about the defense. We gave up some big plays. I already discussed that. But we limited them on the ground to 100 yards even. La Danian Tomlinson? An average of 3.1 yards per carry. Sproles had more than double that, an average of 7.6 yards per carry. Neither had more than a 15 yard play though. We had control on the ground.
We blitzed at the wrong time, and blew assignments. Stanford Routt was covering Jackosn, but came in on the blitz. He had a lot of ground to cover, though, and Rivers found Jackson wide open in the end zone. My thoughts? I saw Hiram Eugene come in late, so I am thinking he was supposed to slide over a lot sooner. That, or Routt wasn’t supposed to blitz. Take your pick.
Even with the big plays, the defense adjusted enough in the second half to allow them only one field goal. This includes a stand where they had first and goal from the 3 yard line.
So lets delve further into the numbers.
We had 13 first downs, compared to their 20.
Both teams had 8 first downs by rushing, none by penalty. Obviously math tells us they had 12 first downs via passing. We had only 5.
Total net yards? 180 for us, almost double for them with 346 yards.
The sickening part of this? We were almost even on offensive plays. We ran 54 plays, they ran 56 plays.
I mentioned above this was a game of yards. We averaged a meager 3.3 yards per play (not even enough for a first down on 3 consecutive plays), where as they averaged 6.2 yards per play. Again, you all can do the math. That means 2 plays for a first.
Rushing plays, again we were pretty even. We ran 27 times for 99 yards. They ran 29 times for 100 yards.
Russell was sacked 5 times for a combined loss of 28 yards. Rivers was sacked once for a loss of 3 yards. (Kudos here to rookie Matt Shaughnessy!)
Each quarterback threw one interception.
They fumbled away once.
Penalties were pretty even, 6 for 30 yards on us , 5 for 41 yards on them. Each team could have had more flags thrown their way.
Time of possession was pretty even , too. They had the ball for less than one minute longer than we did: 29:31 to 30:29.
Shane Lechler was awesome on his punts again, averaging 53.3 yards per punt while Scifres averaged only 41.7 yards per punt. Shane’s net average was 44 yards, where as Scifres net was only 38.7.
Jonathan Holland finally got some blocking and had one 60 yard return. He was dragged down via what appeared to me to be a horse collar tackle or he may have gone further.
The game came down to the numbers - how many plays, how many yards per play, how many big plays each team had.
They were more successful than we were. They made the big plays. Their quarterback was far more accurate than ours. Their quarterback was better than ours.
The defense gave our offense a chance to redeem itself in the second half. Unfortunately, they stumbled and settled for field goals.
Bottom line, until Russell improves his numbers the Raiders will continue to lose.
It’s all there in the numbers.
As ever,
Win, lose or tie, RAIDERS til I DIE!
BlitzChick
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