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I think there’s greater meaning to the Raiders’ win over the Broncos than meets the eye for Josh McDaniels, and it has to do with the game happening in Denver.To me, it’s how it happened. Coming from behind. On the road. With the season on the line. And in a way in which it looked like, finally, everyone was on the exact same page.
How can I tell? Look at how open Josh Jacobs was at the end of the fourth quarter to set up the field goal to send the game to overtime. And look how open Foster Moreau and Davante Adams got to win it in overtime. It’s all right there for you, on three Derek Carr throws, good for the 111 yards that Las Vegas would need to take out the Broncos at Mile High.
“Josh did exactly what he was supposed to do under pressure—with the clock running in the two-minute drill, and we’re behind. Derek and Foster did the right thing in overtime, and then obviously Davante and Derek do the same thing on the touchdown,” said McDaniels after boarding the team plane to head home. “Look, you just said it. In order to get open like that, you have to do some things. You have to do the right things, and you have to do them the right way.
“Our team’s still growing and our team is still learning one another and what we’re doing and all the rest of it. I don’t think there’s any shortage of belief in it. It takes repetition. It takes commitment. And those guys have done nothing short of giving everything they have to try to put themselves in position to win. Unfortunately, we fell short a number of times. And today … today was a good day.”
So, first, let’s hit those three plays, starting with the 43-yarder to Jacobs.
On that one, from the 50, with 57 seconds left, the Raiders had seen a zone-heavy Denver defense start to trend toward playing more man.
“The first two or three plays of the drive were man-to-man, and then we were able to catch them with the clock running in the same call, and they had the linebacker matched up on him,” McDaniels said. “In two-minute drives, you try to find some chunk plays. And if you’re able to do it with a ’backer on a back and just make one move and get down the sideline, then obviously that’s a simple way to do it. And so the man-to-man coverage, the fact that they did it in the two-minute, I think that’s kinda what gave us the opportunity to hit it.”
The next two plays related to Jacobs, too—and the 109 yards he was able to grind out over 24 carries throughout the game.
That the threat was there, and real, opened up things off play-action first for Moreau for 33 yards and then Adams for 35 and the win.
“JJ gutted out over 100 yards, and we kept sticking him in there,” McDaniels says. “And the last two plays—the one to Foster and the one to Davante—I mean, the reason that you’re able to run those is because they come off of the running game. So to be able to use play-action at that point in the game, I think the reason we were able to do that is because we did eventually make some yards in the running game.”
Now, does this mean there’s been some revolutionary breakthrough in Vegas and the Raiders are about to tear off eight straight, get to 10 wins and make the playoffs? It does not. But I think there were a bunch of little victories in this win that, if McDaniels and GM Dave Ziegler wind up winning in Vegas, those guys may look back on this game as the point when they turned it around.
This game shows the players are still committed and proves that all the listening and learning they did came with a purpose.
“That’s what we signed up for,” McDaniels says. “Everybody hopes for it to go perfectly right off the bat. Look, we were 6–0 my first time in Denver, and that didn’t end very well. So how it starts isn’t necessarily the most important thing to me. The most important thing to me is we’re doing it the right way, we’re treating people the right way, we’re trying to teach the way that we believe in. And over time, which I’m just telling you, that’s my mentality. I didn’t come here to try to win one year. And so if it takes a little time, then it is what it is. That’s what’s gonna happen.
“And so if it takes work and effort, and there’s some hard losses in there—which there already has been—well that’s part of the adversity that you have to be able to handle if you want to keep climbing the mountain. And I think our guys have been tremendous, they stayed the course and the leadership on our team has been awesome.”
And in that leadership group is Carr. We’ll have more on him from McDaniels in the MAQB column in a few hours.
