McDaniels on Raiders' Failure to Finish Down the Stretch in Loss to Rams
Just when it looked as though the Las Vegas Raiders had put their late-game fallouts behind them, the team let yet another game slip from its grasp in the fourth quarter when it fell, 17-16, to the Los Angeles Rams on Thursday night.
Las Vegas had several opportunities in the waning minutes of Thursday's game to cap off what would have been its fourth win in a row after starting the season 2-7.
“I don’t look at it as a step back," Raiders Coach Josh McDaniels said in his post-game press conference. "I mean, we didn’t finish the game. That’s the reality. I thought we were ready to play, I thought we competed. We got off to a decent start and then we just didn’t capitalize. And the bottom line is until we figure out how to stop losing games with mistakes that we do ourselves, then it makes it very difficult to win. So you can’t really win until you stop [yourself] from losing, and that’s penalties, turnovers, things like that contribute to that. And so, we’ve talked a lot about that. We obviously need to do a better job of coaching it and trying to get us to play better.”
While the blown fourth-quarter lead was what ultimately decided the outcome of the game, McDaniels acknowledged that there are mistakes and missed opportunities all throughout the game that need to be accounted for.
“It’s 60 minutes," McDaniels said. "And everybody will point to the last play or the last four plays, or the last drive, or what have you, but there’s plays in every quarter that could have helped us extend the lead. There’s things we could have done in all three phases that would have put us further ahead in games. And look, I mean, there’s a lot of things that go into a result in the National Football League. And I’m thinking of six or eight or 10 of them right now that could have changed some outcomes of drives either way.
"So these are hard lessons to learn. They are. … You always play to win. We’re aggressive and try to do those kind of things, but we’re one yard shy of a first down on the third-and-one, and they make a stop there, and if we get it, the game’s over. So there’s a lot of things we could point to right now that would have helped us close the game.”
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