Through the first three weeks of the season, the Raiders have been one of NFL’s most disappointing teams on offense.
Despite the additions of Geno Smith, Ashton Jeanty and offensive coordinator Chip Kelly, the Raiders haven’t been able to create an identity on offense, and pressure is beginning to mount on the coaches and players to figure things out.
The problems on offense begin at the line of scrimmage and the offensive line has been heavily criticized of late, particularly after their disastrous week 3 performance. It’s no secret the Raiders aren’t the most talented group in the offensive trenches, but former Raiders’ color commentator Lincoln Kennedy believes there is a solution.
“It can be fixed. What has to happen is that the Raiders have got to find at least four staple runs that they can do no matter what against anyone. And it doesn’t matter what defenses play, four staple runs that we know that we can rely on, and they need to establish that,” Kennedy said on the Locked on Raiders Squad Show podcast.
“They don’t have that yet… and I’m recalling back to my most successful days as a player, we had a handful of plays that we could call no matter what. I [could] look in the huddle and see the personnel, ‘Okay, I know where we’re running.’ And if we had audibles, you would change it, adjusting accordingly. But you have runs, you have staple runs. The Raiders don’t have a staple offense right now. They’re still trying to figure it out.”
As for what those staple runs should look like, Kennedy would like to see the Raiders start by getting away from the pistol formation.
“I don’t like the point of inception. What I mean by that is I do not like them going out of pistol, which is a shotgun quarterback with a running back three yards behind,” Kennedy said.
“The reason why is with that running back three yards behind the quarterback, who’s standing at five yards in shotgun, that puts [the running back] eight yards off of the line of scrimmage. You have eight yards that you have to catch up before you get to the line of scrimmage. There are so many things that can happen. More times that we’ve seen than not, it’s been penetration.” Kennedy continued.
“When the Raiders have been able to [win]… the line of scrimmage, they’ve had successful runs. But when they’ve had penetration or when you have running backs, the moment they get the handoff, having to make the cut, making a guy miss here, making a guy miss there, for whatever, miscommunication, guys shooting the gaps, penetration, however you want to break it down. It does not work.”
Kennedy isn’t the only one that has begun to question Kelly’s offensive scheme in recent days and prior to the Raiders’ week 3 game in Washington, it was former NFL tight end Logan Paulsen who raised questions about the way Kelly is trying to attack opposing defenses.
“This is going to sound mean, but I don’t mean it to be in a mean way. This is like, it feels like a very ‘collegey’ offense,” Paulsen said on the Take Command podcast. “It’s the spacing, the formations, the distribution, all feels very ‘collegy.’”
“One of the things in college is like you have these wider hash marks. You have these wider hash marks. When you run your RPOs, when you run your little bubble screen… when you run that seam that gets picked off against the Chargers… That works when you’re in college, when you’re on the left hash and the safety has to cover all this ground to get over top of the three-receiver set.”
“You look at really well-designed run games in the NFL [and] I think you look at Green Bay, you look at San Francisco as a good example. Baltimore does a great job in terms of creating good angles with formation, with receivers. There’s not a lot of that going on [with the Raiders],” Paulsen continued.
“You can tell that Chip Kelly really wants to rely on the RPO to create and distribute the field and create space, but it’s not distributing the same way that it was when he was at Ohio State last year,” Paulsen added. “I think you get some really tough matchups in the run game in terms of angles on combinations, and you get a lot of free runners because you’re not getting the same displacement because RPO. As a result, Ashton Jeanty is getting hit in the backfield a lot.”
“I think Chip Kelly will figure it out at some point. I think they’ll find a way to get a little bit more nuanced, a little bit more varied in terms of the run game that they’re calling, how they get to some of their past concepts, how they distribute the RPO stuff… but right now, man, it’s tough,”
x: @raidersbeat
Why the heck, aren’t we bringing in free agent offensive lineman to work out, or looking into a trade for one!
Unfortunately, good offensive linemen are not that easy to find, which is why they tend to go early in the draft. Say, around #6.
And small non pass protecting RB’s go in the mid rounds.
Pete has hardly ever cared about the OL. With one of Pete’s kids over the OL and another involved with the rest of the offense it’s truly difficult to figure out if Chip has any real authority on the play call selection or scheme. Paulson is right though very basic NFL but more like college scheme.