After Sunday’s disappointing loss to the Washington Commanders, Raiders head coach Pete Carroll took responsibility for the team not being ready to play.
“It looked like we were off,” Carroll said after the game. “It’s not scheme-wise. Just physically, I didn’t get them right. I’m taking this one, and I’m disappointed in myself.”
The Raiders were ineffective in all three phases of the game on Sunday, and former Raiders’ great Lincoln Kennedy was on board with Carroll’s message after the game but said the 74-year-old head coach was not the one to blame for the team’s terrible effort.
“To me, I see what Pete Carroll did, and I understand why he did it. Being the head coach, you’re supposed to take the blame, just like the quarterback. But this wasn’t a coaching problem… this was an effort issue,” Kennedy said on the Locked on Raiders Squad Show podcast.
“When you have one guy break down in the secondary, and there’s a long pass play for a touchdown. That’s a breakdown. This is a breakdown where you’re supposed to take a proper angle to make a tackle and you miss, or you don’t wrap up, you just try to shoulder bump. That’s not a coaching thing; that’s an effort instance.”
Kennedy went on to say he believes the coaching staff, particularly on the offensive side of the ball, needs to make adjustments to the scheme.
He wants to see the quarterback taking more snaps under center in the weeks ahead.
“I’m here to tell you that they need to take shotgun away from this offense,” Kennedy said.
“You need to have Geno Smith under the center every single time because that changes the trajectory of those defensive ends attacking you. The reason why Geno Smith, the moment he gets to football, there are people in his face is because the tackles who control the width of the pocket are getting collapsed back because they’re chasing speed up the field,” Kennedy continued.
“They’re turning their shoulders and chasing speed up the field. That’s why the pocket is collapsing around the sides on him before they collapse in the middle. And Geno’s not the type of quarterback who steps up in the pocket. A lot of times he wants to step out where he has open space and those defensive ends and those outside linebackers are preventing that.”
x: @raidersbeat
The Raiders are now the most losing team in the NFL since Mark Davis inherited this team in 2011. We need a new owner in command and charge, Mark should just sell it off to Tom Brady bit by bit. ( We need a hand off of ownership from the ultimate loser in Mark Davis to the ultimate winner in Tom Brady.) Remove the Davis family curse is the only answer here, all the way back to the time when Al Davis stole this team from Wayne Valley, allegedly. Mark Davis must go and it is getting real close to boycott time until he does. There is a whole generation that has grown up now that has never seen the Raiders win a playoff game. Davis will do what he does and continue to play the blame game and fire people when he needs to resign as the cause of all this failure.
Lincoln Kennedy was one of many free agents brought in from the Falcons to form our last championship team. Kennedy knows not just line play but football in general and is a true Raider. If we are ever going to win again we must do more in free agency and sign dominant players like Lincoln Kennedy was. Our last championship team was built through free agency and this team has more money now in Vegas, but it not spending it to improve. The Raiders as perpetual losers is not acceptable and neither is Mark Davis as owner if this continues.
WEST SIDE
RN
Since 1975
Tom Brady is a flipping idiot. He fired Telesco for his flunkie college buddy & he said Darnold wasn’t good enough. Hes a complete joke & he’s the Michael Jordan of executives.
We need Mark Walter’s or the Fertita brothers.
Smart owners not jocks
I was going to type roughly the same thing. Mark’s inability to separate good football people and bad ones is the reason his attempts to right the wrongs is always wrong. Brady is just the latest example. We needed a complete rebuild instead we are going to be stuck in this pattern of losing in bunches for the next couple years since the HC,OC,FO and others thought we were a 35 yr old mediocre QB and a small non pass protecting RB without a fluid burst at #6 overall away from winning.
And it doesn’t have to be this way. We are a desirable location now. We have revenue up the wazzoo yet it doesn’t matter when your owner is completely clueless.
Mark had 40 years to learn from his dad about what to do & what not to do, but Al knew if you had talent.
Everything Tom has done has been wrong. And for the next 2 years they will be trying to fix all their mistakes from this past year and it won’t get better.
We still need help on all the positions they avoided last year. And like you said all they did was take a RB, who isn’t a game changer, in the top 5. They don’t know crap about roster building. Mark needs to sell right now
I’m a 45 year fan of the raiders. I don’t think mark davis as ever been a fan of the raiders. The raiders will always be the floor mat of the NFL . The league wants it that way. The owner wants it that way. It’s never going to change.
While he may be a nice guy and a past Super Bowl winning coach, Pete Carroll, and his son, are not the long term solution, for the Raiders. What has been lacking, for the Raiders for years, is a short and long term plan. Raiders ownership has tried, unsuccessfully, to address long term fixes by hiring a number of unsuccessful coaches and General Managers. Obviously, Raiders ownership has made epic bad choices for these positions. Admittedly, hiring good coaching and management personnel is not an exact science and naming names, of these bad choices won’t help either. Al Davis famously said; “The greatness of the Raiders is their future.” No team has suffered more, since their last Super Bowl win than the New York Jets. Before that, it took the Kansas City Chiefs 50 years to win their second Super Bowl. To me, Raiders ownership should be asking itself, right now, “Who will succeed Pete Carroll; why aren’t our scouts scrutinizing small school players from all over the country?
Lots of people believe that round one and two draft picks are the best players to draft. I assert, however, that the majority of any team’s players are not made up of first and second round draft picks. I could name hundreds of late round and even undrafted players who became the bedrocks of their respective teams; Julian Edelman undrafted from Kent State, the first man to win six Super Bowl Rings, a fourth round draft pick from James Madison University, Charles Haley. undrafted Super Bowl winning quarterback Kurt Warner. seven time Super Bowl winning quarterback who was selected 199th in his draft class, Tom Brady and the list goes on and on. Jerry Rice from Mississippi Valley State, Walter Peyton from Jackson State, Marshall Faulk from San Diego State, Art Shell from Townson, Patrick Mahomes from Texas A&M, Josh Allen from Wyoming.
For whatever reason, the Green Bay Packers seem to continually trade for, recruit, draft and acquire players that keep that team consistently competitive. Surely, if the smallest market team, in the NFL, can routinely field a competitive team then large pockets can’t solely be the answer. Look at the Dallas Cowboys, the richest NFL franchise, for whatever reason their great wealth can’t help them field a consistent playoff team. My point is that money alone can’t make a team competitive but a consistent and long term strategy can. Bluster, bloviation, hyperbole and a 4 billion dollar stadium can’t suffice for bad decision making, on a managerial level.
With respect to Raiders ownership and fielding a competitive team, I defer to Act 1 Scene 4 of the play Hamlet where Marcellus makes the statement; “Something is rotten in Denmark.”
This is right. Since he took over the team, Mark Davis has committed to a true rebuild exactly once: when he hired Reggie McKenzie. And for some of his faults, the culmination of Reggie’s rebuild was a 12-4 season where a Carr injury was the only thing that kept them from legitimately making noise in the playoffs. Then 2017 happened, Carr was hurt again, and never quite right, and he passes of control to his mancrush, Gruden.
Gruden did attempt a rebuild, poorly, but that was definitely not the intention going into 2018.
Then he goes Ziegler/McDaniels, who immediately make a massive trade for Davante Adams. They suck, get replaced by Pierce and Telesco and rather than rebuild, AP keeps Adams going into the season and talks the team up as a contender.
At basically no point has there been a sustainable, consistent philosophy towards building a stable and functional organization.
If/when Brady fails, Mark will hire another famous person he knows from TV (remember his interest in Rex Ryan?), and the process will repeat.
Simply Said Top to Bottom… They STINK… Didn’t expect much this Year but I did expect them to be competitive and to play hard as if they expected to Win…. Earn those Bloated Paychecks – that includes The Staff!!!
What a bunch of Whiners. Saying the same thing every year. Go rout for another team then. ****. We’re going in a new direction. Get over it. I’ve been a Raider fan since the very beginning. It is what it is. I still have faith, never wavering.