An ESPN report on Wednesday said “people around the league” have become skeptical of Chip Kelly’s offense and that’s going to be a storyline to watch if the Raiders don’t figure things out on offense soon.
Geno Smith has not played well in the first month of the season, but head coach Pete Carroll has been slow to point the finger at his starting quarterback – even to the point of sounding a little crazy earlier in the week.
On Wednesday afternoon, though, Carroll seemed to agree with “people around the league” that Kelly has not been very good in his first season as offensive coordinator of the Raiders.
“The running game has looked well… we need to get more of it. That’s part of it. That’s just mixing football. That’s how you do it. We don’t want to ever rely on the quarterback to do the whole show and sit in shotgun and throw the football. Never coach that way,” Carroll told members of the media at his Wednesday press conference.
“And then, we’ve got to make sure we’re calling all the best stuff in the situations,” Carroll continued. “[Smith is] not calling the plays. We’ve got to call them, and we’ve got to make sure to get him in the right spots and give him the best chance to stay out of harm’s way.”
Without question, Carroll was criticizing Kelly’s play calling and he seems to have the same concerns former Raider great Lincoln Kennedy talked about two weeks ago.
Kennedy doesn’t like Geno Smith in shotgun, and he didn’t like the formations the Raiders were running from in the first few weeks of the season.
“It can be fixed,” Kennedy said of the Raiders’ offense on the Locked on Raiders Squad Show podcast.
“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 continued.
“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 the 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.”
Without question, Carroll has been more supportive of his quarterback than his offensive coordinator, and that’s going to be a dynamic to watch going forward.
x: @raidersbeat
Shocker, Pete is defending his teachers pet who has had 1 decent season in 15 years.
It’s 2025 Pete, we’ve got coach’s film and the internet can post said film of players being wide open & Geno throws into double coverage, or just the guy who isn’t wide open.
I’m sure Mark will give these morons at least another year. It’s back to Commitment to Excuses just like the Reggie era
Reggie took over one of the worst situations in football and had them a Derek Carr injury away from being a real threat to make a playoff run, based pretty entirely off of his drafts. He drafted a HOFer (Mack), a 10 year starter and Pro-Bowl QB (Carr), a 10 year, an above average guard who played for a decade (Gabe Jackson), not to mention useful players like TJ Carrie and Shelby Harris in a single draft. The followed that up the next year by drafting a 5 time pro-bowl WR who just retired with 10,000 receiving yards, and a number of other players still active in the league. As the draft position got lower, the results got worse, but his last draft included an average or better starting LT, though who knows how much Gruden was involved in that pick. And it’s not like the Karl Joseph and Gareon Conley picks were considered crazy at the time.
It might have been time to move on from him, but giving the power to Gruden and Mayock was a disaster. Reggie deserves more respect than he seems to get from Raiders fans, Imo.
Who hired the guy, Pete? Shotgun % is a widely available metric, and I suspect Kelly wasn’t under center more in college. If you wanted a Shanahan-system guy, there were multiple options available. I suppose Kelly could have been a Mark Davis call(he’s a famous guy Mark would know from TV), but Carroll isn’t some guy who has never been a HC and is desperate for an opportunity. And while I think the shotgun has hurt Jeanty and the running game considering how often first contact comes behind the line of scrimmage, I also don’t know that Geno Smith is at his best from under center. His splits are kind of all over the place, but the last 3 seasons, he has attempted way more passes from the gun than from under center. I don’t know if that’s a design thing, or a comfort thing, but if Carroll wanted an offense and QB that operated from under center more often, those options were available.
So it strikes me a bit lame to have all these criticisms after the fact when all the information was out there for him when he made his decision.