The Raiders will go into the 2024 season without former league-leading rusher Josh Jacobs and reports have conflicted on the level of effort the team made to bring him back.
Some say the Raiders made him a comparable offer to what he got from Green Bay, and others have suggested the Raiders offer wasn’t particularly close.
At minimum, the Raiders were willing to let Jacobs leave and they seem to have plenty of confidence in third year running back Zamir White.
White was a fourth-round draft pick in 2022 and impressed as Jacobs’ replacement in the final four games of the 2023 season. He has become somewhat of an internet sensation among Raider fans for his physical stature (he’s built like a linebacker), but some within the organization feel like he stands out even among his NFL peers.
Raiders radio host “JT The Brick” shared a story about that last week…
”Someone told me this in the building,” JT said on his Raider Nation Radio show. “If you lined up all 32 starting running backs in the league and said put on a tank top or take off your shirt, everyone would say who the hell is that guy?”
“Who is the guy that looks bigger than Micah Parsons… who is that guy? We’ve got him and he played pretty good in his last four games [of the 2023 season].”
White averaged 3.21 yards after contact last year, according to Pro Football Focus analytics, and that was good enough for 10th-best in the league. His 84 carries for 397 yards over the last four games of the season were a limited sample size, but it’s no small detail that his best performance during that stretch came against the Kansas City Chiefs on the road (22 carries for 145 yards).
The expectation is that the Raiders will implement a running back by committee approach going forward, but if White continues to run the way he did against the Chiefs on Christmas day, it will be hard to justify taking him off the field.
x: @raidersbeat
We have to win the first game to get momentum, with new linemen and Tight Ends hopefully they will open lanes for Zamir White, remember they are learning a new offensive scheme, but I think we can count on the defense to keep us in the game, who knows, we will see.