Raiders at Chiefs - Week 5 - Record: 4-1

It had to happen someday. Our defense's liabilities would be brutally exposed.

Interesting, do you know we'd been 28-2 against the AFC West since that game when Jamaal Charles fumbled it away against the Broncos at the beginning of the 2015 season? Those two games, both Thursday night games: the Raiders in 2017 when we were way ahead but they came back with the help of lots of PI calls on Eric Murray, and 2018 when we were also way ahead but the Chargers came back and beat us with a two-point conversion at the very end of the game. 

The turning point in this one was when we were in total command in the 2nd quarter, and Tyreek Hill was targeted on a deep throw and was totally PI'd by the Raiders defender. No call. There is a ruthless example of where the fourth horseman of the football apocalypse can really destroy us. Right after that obvious non-call we had a chance to keep things going and Mahomes made a great play throwing the ball right into rarely-used Nick Keizer's hands, but he dropped it. A guy like that simply can't afford to drop that ball. 4th down, no points, when we should have had the ball close to the goal line.

It was all downhill from there.

The refs were all over us all day. There were a number of questionable holding calls on our O-linemen that cost us big, a cheap-shot pick call on Kelce that eliminated a TD... I don't know. I could complain about the NFL notifying the officials to start being really picky against us because they had been pretty light on us for the past year and a half. 

As far as our D goes, ouch. We so need better linebackers. This is not news. Ben Niemann is just not getting it done back there. They ran over us all day. Our D-line did okay, but they can only do so much.

The Raiders ran the football against us, which really is the strategy to keep games close against us. Other teams are realizing that because we just don't have that Ray Lewis guy there (oh the years and years I've been shouting for that.) By doing that they are taking possession time away from our offense. That's the secret to beating the Chiefs, and let's face it, if our D cannot stop the run, we won't repeat no matter how great Mahomes is. Our D was not good today. Throughout much of the 2nd half the Raiders played us like we had 8 guys out there on defense.

Their O-line was good. Our O-line, let's face it -- CEH is simply not getting untracked. We lost our fine new LG Osemele early to injury. 

Meanwhile, for much of the 2nd half it looked like the Raiders had 17 guys on defense against us. Mahomes just looked frazzled far too much. We managed to get a late TD score to get us to within one score, but we simply could not stop the run when the Raiders needed to chew clock.

Well, any given Sunday, that's the NFL. We should do fine adjusting our match ups against other teams, and we've been doing a terrific job against our AFC West opponents for a long time. And in a perverse way, we can now really grasp what others know about our team and we should get that worked out.

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