The Raiders will face one of their biggest challenges on Sunday, and the challenge won’t necessarily have anything to do with the Cleveland Browns.
On Friday, head coach Antonio Pierce announced that Maxx Crosby (ankle) and Davante Adams (hamstring) will both be out this week as they recover from injuries. Crosby has a lingering high ankle sprain and Adams showed up on the injury report at the end of the week with a hamstring injury.
The Raiders might have to scale back the offensive gameplan with Adams out of the lineup, but that might have been the direction the team was going even before Adams pulled up lame.
Raiders radio host ‘JT the Brick’ spent the last few days pivoting away from last week’s disappointing loss to the Panthers and looking ahead to what many consider to be a must-win game for both teams on Sunday.
After struggling to run in the first three weeks of the season, conventional wisdom might suggest the Raiders would throw the ball more this week, but JT thinks the Raiders are going to double down on the running game.
“We’ll see… but everything tells me that the Raiders are going to try to run the ball again with this matchup,” JT said on his weekday Raider Nation Radio show.
That’s not a prediction from JT, but he’s not just making up stories as he goes along.
And JT isn’t the only one on the Raiders payroll talking about running the ball on Sunday.
“I’m calling for changes,” color commentator Lincoln Kennedy said this week on The Morning Grind podcast. “Simplify the run game [and] run it till they get it right.”
“Yeah, the boos are going to come out, you’re probably not going to score a whole lot of points or make a whole lot of people happy,” Kennedy continued. “But you know what, you’re going to send an attitude and that’s what I want to see out of this team. An attitude. An attitude that we are who we are, we don’t care what you think about us, and you know what…”
“Some of my most glorious days were just walking up to the line, we’re running right here, stop it. I want to see that out of the team. I want to see that type of attitude to be in our other team.”
It’s no secret that Pierce wants to build a team identity that features a strong running game, so there’s a good chance the Raiders aren’t going to abandon the run anytime soon. They might lean on it even more with Adams out of the lineup.
But will they be able to impose their will against a Browns defense that looks a lot better on paper than the Panthers did a week ago?
We’ll find out soon enough.
x: @raidersbeat
This is a season deciding game. Lose this n any hopes of this team going anywhere or keeping Adams is finished.
The los Vision Raiders are losing focus on fundamental football… come back to California… come back to RAIDER NATION… should have kept rich as a full-time coach… and Carr…