Oakland Raiders: Save vanilla talk for the ice cream parlor

The Oakland Raiders defensive issues aren’t just about vanilla schemes, but rather go back to fundamental problems.

Those in the know will tell you preseason football means little. The Detroit Lions went undefeated in the preseason a perfect 4-0, with good momentum heading into the 2008 season. They parlayed that momentum into posting the worst season in NFL history, the ultimate record of futility 0-16. The Oakland Raiders have had multiple defensive issues throughout the entirety of Ken Norton Jr.’s tenure in Oakland, but because it’s preseason it’s supposed to be cool.

The Raiders finished as the worst in the NFL in 2016 in sack production, despite producing the NFL Defensive Player of the Year, Khalil Mack. The middle of the defense has long been an issue for the Raiders at all three levels. After watching the second preseason game of 2017, it is infuriating to fans and experts alike see a fundamentally unsound defense to be coupled with an offense as dynamic as Oakland’s.

Matt Millen did us as fans and naysayers both a solid in pointing out each and every silly mistake made by the defense. Committing eye violations in bunch formations, linebackers not taking on blockers and delivering a shock properly, not wrapping up after initiating a tackle and allowing the runner to continue gaining yards, and the most egregious football sins in taking one step and then standing straight up.

For those who are not familiar with what that means, gaining leverage over your opponent is essential to winning at the point of attack. In football “the low man wins,” standing up at the line of scrimmage allows the opponent to establish leverage and control you. Millen’s most telling comments were on this subject, preaching the importance of fundamentals.

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The Raiders defense made the Los Angeles Rams offense, which was absolutely abysmal in the 2016 season, look like a strong team on the rise capable of competing with the best of the best.

It must be said that the Rams look to be much improved under first-year head coach Sean McVay. The former Washington Redskins offensive coordinator has brought a much more palatable style of offense to the City of Angels, bringing with him a variation of the offense catapulting Kirk Cousins into the upper echelon of quarterbacks stats.

Now having properly given the Rams their due credit, the Raiders were awful on defense in the first drive. They got pushed all over the field and most importantly the same ugly shortcomings of this team continued to show up from last week, last year, the season before that and the season before that. Quite frankly the same fundamental issues continue to occur.

The Rams first touchdown occurred when the defense lost track of how to play a bunch formation and allowed a rookie wide receiver to run into the end zone and catch a pass for six points without a man around him for at least 10 yards.

The comments that coach Del Rio gave during the halftime interview and after the press conference were the ones that really need to curb any talk of the shortcomings being the result of a vanilla defense. He boiled it down to a lack of “basic execution” as to why they weren’t getting the job done on that side of the ball.

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With all things being equal the preseason is supposed to be a showcase of athletic ability and skill. Teams are not game planning for each other, not watching any tape, and most have no scouting report. So that would imply that teams are playing basic football man-to-man with few schematic twists, and that is terrifying to anyone watching this defense.

Man to man coverage is schoolyard football. Keeping your pad level down to get a push is as basic as it gets, lessons learned from Pop Warner or whatever youth football league is in your area. To put it bluntly, the Raiders faced the most watered down version of offenses they possibly can and performed rather disheartening.

The Raiders defensively are short on superior athletes in the backfield. They are expecting rookies to be able to make the impact that veterans on this team are just not physically able to do. The Raiders zone-based defenders fail at man coverage, and it is incredibly short-sighted to say the team will fix this in the remainder of the preseason since the defensive coordinator Ken Norton Jr. has been unable to solve any of his team’s issues for good.

The secondary is always a step behind and out of position, the tight end can never seem to be properly covered and the defensive tackles seem to be too busy trying to maintain dual gap integrity rather than achieving maximum penetration. There has been three years of continuity on this defensive staff and the players are still not executing basic fundamentals. The communication in the secondary has been so bad that they added another defensive mind to the staff.

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Norton Jr. is failing this team. How he managed to keep his job when a better defensive coordinator was brought in is beyond me. The truth of the matter is this, he has had ample time to teach and coach his scheme at every level. For three years he has been trying to force a square peg into a round hole. The 4-3 under has a natural hole in the defense that the Mike linebacker is supposed to be badass enough to cover. Unfortunately, the Raiders don’t have the athletically gifted personnel that the Seahawks do and that is making all the difference in the world.