McDaniels, Raiders hope to learn from bad loss to Saints

SARASOTA, Fla. — The apologetic tone the Raiders took after an embarrassing 24-0 loss to the Saints on Sunday was replaced by a more pragmatic one by the time they woke up in Sarasota on Monday morning.

What happened the day before was unacceptable and embarrassing, to say the least. A day later, it was time to move on from it as quickly and efficiently as possible.

“If you coach or play long enough, you’re going to have one or two of these,” Raiders coach Josh McDaniels said. “If you let it affect you longer than it should, then that’s shame on you. There’s a lot of teams that go through this. Nobody likes it. Sometimes it can be a learning experience that you look back on and say, man, we needed that. That set us straight and really taught us a lot of hard lessons.”

The Raiders (2-5) will practice this week in Sarasota before playing the Jaguars in Jacksonville on Sunday.

“It’s a long year. I believe we haven’t reached our best football yet,” McDaniels said. “It’s going to take work and progress and improvement in order to do that. There’s so many games and so much football left to be played. There’s a lot of things we need to do better. We need to coach and play better to earn better results.”

From this point on, the Raiders face near must-win situations every week. The gravity of the situation needs an appropriate response.

“Just more urgency. Urgency is the word,” said Raiders quarterback Derek Carr. “Urgency in the meetings, in the walk-through. Competitive. No one is going to give you anything in this league.”

Carr and the Raiders have talked in those terms a handful of times this season. But perhaps fooled by the closeness of their four losses over their first six games, they haven’t yet matched those words with the necessary sense of desperation. But getting waylaid the way they did on Sunday could — or should — change that.

Carr is curious about how the Raiders show up to work this week in Florida, his sense of this group leads him to believe they will come correct.

“One thing that I know about our team is that we’ve responded every time that there have been challenges,” he said. “Every time that we’ve went through something, we respond the right way. We come to work the right way. And we have a great opportunity to be together all week. We will have to do that.”

Unlike previous weeks when the Raiders’ woes were easy to pinpoint, the team-wide meltdown means no one is beyond reproach.

That goes for an offensive line that struggled mightily — including the normally stout Kolton Miller — a defensive line that could not generate even a hint of pass-rush pressure to a back end that had difficulty defending the middle of the field. The blame goes far and wide.

The Raiders could not figure out a way to free up Davante Adams, Josh Jacobs had no room to work with in the run game, the special teams had two key penalties, the play-calling in short-yardage situations was curious and a flawed decision to call a fake punt was compounded by a lack of execution and a penalty that tacked on 15 more yards for the Saints.

But with blame comes the responsibility to correct. That comes down to 53 players and an entire coaching staff doing their jobs at a much higher level.

“I don’t think there is any big speech to give,” McDaniels said. “Clearly, we need to improve in all three phases. That’s our job. That’s my responsibility. Like I said, that’s what we are going to have to do, and that’s what we will do.”

Contact Vincent Bonsignore at vbonsignore@reviewjournal.com. Follow @VinnyBonsignore on Twitter.