Raiders head coach Antonio Pierce isn’t ready to give up on the running game, and he doubled down this week on the team’s commitment to the running game.
“At some point, you’ve just got to commit to [the run],” Pierce told members of the media this week. “If it’s this week or next week or whenever it comes, you’ve got to commit to the run and stay with it and trust it… It’s hard to get [in] a rhythm when you don’t touch the ball.”
Teams have realized that they can defend the Raider offense without putting an extra defender near the line of scrimmage, and it has become a trend in the first two weeks of the season to defend the Raiders with two safeties deep.
“Teams have played two high [safeties] against the Raiders and they haven’t been able to make them pay for it,” Reed said this week on the Just Win podcast.
“According to TruMedia, it’s been on 56.2 percent of the Raiders snaps that opposing defenses have been in two high, which is the second highest rate in the league. Teams have just been saying, ‘You can’t run the ball’ and the Raiders have been like, ‘Yup, we can’t do it.’ We’ll see if that changes this week. I would assume that the Panthers will take a similar strategy and try to make the Raiders beat them [with the run].”
There has been talk that Zamir White might not be a good fit for the Raiders’ newly implemented zone blocking scheme, and Pierce sounded like a coach this week that is willing throw away elements of the playbook that aren’t working for White.
“There has to be an intent and a play style that we talked about, that we practiced, that we’ve been preaching since day one, and it’s not showing up on game day,” Pierce said. “So obviously, you know, if it’s changes that need to be made or scheme, everything is on the table.”
As for White’s workload in the weeks ahead, Pierce said he would like to get the Raiders’ third-year running back 20+ carries per game.
Given the Panthers inability to stop the run in the first two weeks of the season (second-worst in the NFL), there’s a good chance White might be headed for a big game on Sunday in the Raiders’ home opener.
x: @raidersbeat