The Las Vegas Raiders have completed their preseason and can now begin the regular season once they have trimmed down their 53-man roster. Coach Antonio Pierce has already begun preparations for the Week 1 game against AFC West opponent Los Angeles, led by returning NFL coach Jim Harbaugh.
In garages and living rooms and anywhere there is working Wi-Fi, fans across the country are already putting together their fantasy football teams for the upcoming season.
Pro Football Focus, the analytics company that has taken the football world by storm over the past 10 years, shared its thoughts on how the Raiders will factor into fantasy football this season.
PFF’s Nathan Jahnke concluded in a recent list of preseason insights that the “Las Vegas Raiders don’t trust their running backs.”
“Zamir White started both preseason games with the starters,” Jahnke wrote. “In both games, he was consistently taken out for third-and-medium and third-and-long situations, even when it was his drive. He played the first drive of the first game, but was taken out for the second drive, which used a mix of starters and substitutes. He returned to the game for two plays with the substitutes on the third drive. In the second game, he played on the first two drives.
“He was taken off the field for the third drive, which was still mostly with starters. He returned for the fourth, fifth and sixth drives, taking most of the early snaps outside of a first-and-10. On the seventh drive, he did not play at all during a two-minute drill. He returned to start the third quarter with three of the 10 other players who started the game. He did not play in the third game.”
Of Alexander Mattison, the likely No. 2 running back in terms of number of carries, Jahnke highlighted his abilities on third down.
“He played every snap on the second drive with a mix of starters and substitutes,” Jahnke wrote. “He came back for five snaps on the third drive and was the first running back taken out of the game. Mattison was again the third-down back on the first two drives of the second game with the starters. He played the first nine snaps on the third drive, mostly with the starters. He didn’t play at all on the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh drives, but he came back for four snaps on the eighth drive in the third quarter, mostly with substitutes. He didn’t play in the third game.”
Interestingly, Jahnke confirmed a well-known truth of the preseason football season, even as he reached the above-mentioned conclusion about silver and black, trust and ball carriers.
“The Raiders usually let their starters play a quarter in the first and second preseason games, but they also had more trouble than most teams when it came to taking players out of the game,” he wrote. “They rested their starters and almost all of the substitutes who had been guaranteed a spot on the roster for the third game.”
One wonders why the Raiders don’t trust their ball carriers.
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