Superdown: Raiders’ progress halted in New Orleans with shutout loss

By Case Keefer (contact)

Monday, Oct. 31, 2022 | 2 a.m.

Josh McDaniels slowly backpedaled and scratched his head as a Derek Carr pass wobbled towards the sideline closer to him than it was to anyone on the field.

It was near the end of the third quarter and in the middle of a Raiders’ comeback attempt that never really got started. McDaniels’ presumably wasn’t consciously reacting to yet another failed play from his veteran quarterback and meaning to show frustration, but he might as well have been.

The first-year coach’s motions were the perfect description of a day where the Raiders took a big step backwards in a puzzling, listless 24-0 loss to the New Orleans Saints at Caesars Superdome.

“(McDaniels) and I will sit down, we’ll talk as leaders and figure that out and put our finger on it but it’s just embarrassing,” Carr said in his postgame news conference. “We can’t have that, ever…That should never happen, especially with the group of guys in that locker room.”

Losing is no foreign concept to the Raiders, which fell to 2-5 on the year, but they had been highly competitive in every other game this season. They lost their first three games all by less than a touchdown and then bounced back in the last three — a pair of wins and a hard-fought, one-point loss at the AFC West-ruling Chiefs.

Las Vegas appeared to develop an identity in those last three games, one that centered on running back Josh Jacobs and wide receiver Davante Adams offensively with the defense making just enough plays at key times to stay afloat. None of that happened in New Orleans.

Jacobs was held to a season-low 43 rushing yards, while Adams had one catch for three yards on five targets. The offense gained only 183 yards on 3.3 yards per play, while the defense gave up 367 yards and 5.8 yards per play — and the Saints’ numbers would have been higher if not for two drives at the end of the game where they were trying to run out the clock.

“If you’re going to point a finger, point it at me,” McDaniels said afterwards. “Obviously I’ve got to do a better job getting us ready on gameday, but I love the group and think they really band together in the second half. We didn’t do anything offensively to help us get back in the game but there was no quit in the football team.”

Las Vegas did so little offensively that it didn’t even cross the 50-yard line until the final drive of the game when backup quarterback Jarrett Stidham checked in to save Carr from taking any more damage. Carr was sacked three times and hit on six more occasions in a day where the Raiders’ offensive line regressed after having played better recently, allowing Saints’ edge rushers Cameron Jordan, Marcus Davenport and Payton Turner to affect virtually every play.

Carr finished with a career-low (in a game where he was not taken out for injury) 101 passing yards in completing 15 of 26 attempts.

And those numbers barely scratch the surface of the list of Raiders’ demerits coming out of a game. The shutout defeat was their first since Nov. 30, 2014, against the then-St. Louis Rams in a season that started with the man on the opposite sideline on Sunday — current New Orleans coach Dennis Allen — in charged.

Raiders owner Mark Davis fired Allen — known as “DA” to all his current and former players — four games into the season, and tensions have simmered ever since. Saints running back Alvin Kamara said this week that New Orleans would “whoop” Las Vegas to “make DA feel good.”

The words didn’t do much to fire up a defense that captain and edge rusher Maxx Crosby said didn’t show up ready to play. Kamara had 158 combined rushing and receiving yards and scored all three Saints’ touchdowns.

“We have to do much better obviously in every phase of the game to be able to compete with a team that’s well-coached, has good players and obviously came ready to play and did a much better job than we did,” McDaniels said. “It starts with me, and we’re going to work hard and we’re going to fix it.”

The Raiders will be attempting to fix it at IMG Academy in Sarasota, Fla., where they traveled directly after the game. The plan was to camp out there solely to avoid back-to-back cross-country trips with a game at Jacksonville scheduled for next Sunday, but the team is now looking at it as an opportunity to focus and come together.

Carr said there will be “nothing else to do” other than be around teammates and “nowhere else to go” but the team hotel and practices. A number of his teammates similarly described it as an opportunity.

“When we went to London back in 2019, my rookie year, it gave us a good time to bond, a good time to get everything together and we played some good football after that,” receiver Hunter Renfrow said. “So hopefully, we can go in here, get better, have a good week of practice, get around the guys and come together as a team.”

Renfrow was another player who made no impact on Sunday, catching one pass for six yards despite being the second option in the passing game behind Adams with tight end Darren Waller missing his second consecutive game. Waller ran through drills to test his injured hamstring about three hours before kickoff, but he was determined not to be healthy enough.

That meant a hometown start for tight end Foster Moreau, who was a prep star less than three miles away at Jesuit High School before attending LSU in nearby Baton Rogue, La. In front of a large contingent of family and friends, Moreau might have put up one of the Raiders’ only strong statistical lines with six catches for 31 yards.

But he said he played “terrible,” and accepted blame for the loss.

“It was the antithesis of everything we want to do on the football field,” he said. “We don’t want to put any of that stuff on tape. We played bad. We accept that. We own that.”

The Raiders have a lot of problems, but taking accountability isn’t among them as the players virtually lined up to self-flagellate for their performances. That doesn’t take the sting out of the loss, though.

The circumstances made it hurt more — that they were humiliated by Allen, that they couldn’t complete a single pass of 15 yards or more until the final minutes when Stidham checked in.

And, mostly, that a season that seemed to be on the ups came floating down so effortlessly.

“We’re so much better than that but we didn’t earn that today,” Carr said. “But you look at it, you’ve got a lot of guys in the locker room that care a lot, that will be self-critical and I promise you we will try to do better next week.”

Case Keefer can be reached at 702-948-2790 or [email protected]. Follow Case on Twitter at twitter.com/casekeefer.Case Keefer can be reached at 702-948-2790 or