Raiders report: As Jon Gruden evaluates, 49ers play starters

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — It was a tale of two approaches when the Raiders closed their preseason with a 34-10 loss to the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday at Levi’s Stadium.

You had the 49ers playing a majority of their starters for the first two quarters. And you had the Raiders leaving their starters and key players in Las Vegas.

From Raiders coach Jon Gruden’s perspective, protecting the players he considers certainties while getting a good look at the uncertainties was the objective.

“Evaluation is critical,” Gruden said. “The only way you evaluate guys is in live situations. We needed these three preseason games to see where our second-year players are, where some of our new players are and where some of our rookies are.”

In contrast, the 49ers appeared to be using Sunday to do some last-minute fine-tuning. That meant running a fair amount of clever zone-read plays that caught the Raiders off guard and resulted in a handful of big plays.

“We didn’t card up a lot of those plays,” Gruden said. “I’ll give the 49ers a lot of credit; they got us on a couple of those looks.”

The focus now is getting the 53-man roster set by Tuesday’s 1 p.m. PDT deadline. Keeping those players as healthy as possible took precedent over everything else. Even if it meant leaving nearly half the team in Las Vegas.

“I think you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t in a lot of ways,” Gruden said. “You lose two or three of your starters in this game, you know the questions will be different. We like what we’ve done with our offseason program, our training camp. We took the approach to evaluate the guys we didn’t know much about.”

Quote of the day

While the Raiders didn’t game plan for the 49ers’ zone-read offense that typically keeps teams off balance, the humbling experience could be beneficial to some young defensive players.

“You need that,” said veteran defensive lineman Gerald McCoy, who played in his first game in more than 20 months. “And really a lot of it is just reading keys and playing what you see with an offense like that. They draw it up so well, it’s a lot of window dressing, a lot of smoke and mirrors to get you to look all over the place for something simple. And they’re one of the best in the league at doing that.”

Play of the day

Raiders rookie wide receiver Dillon Stoner, an undrafted free agent from Oklahoma State, has quietly had a solid training camp while flashing as a receiver and special teams player. It might not be enough to land a roster spot, but he’s at least in the mix as a practice squad candidate.

Either way, he left a favorable impression Sunday with two catches from Nate Peterman, the first for 29 yards and the second for 32.

“It’s been a long preseason, a long training camp,” Stoner said. “It’s cool to see some work come to fruition today.”

Now, Stoner will spend an anxious 48 hours awaiting his fate.

“Obviously this is my first time in this type of situation,” he said. “All you can do is all you can do. I felt like I did that today.”

Said Gruden: “I wanted to see him. He returned kickoffs and punts. He played X, played Z. I think he even snuck in the slot position. It was a tough outing for us, but on the stat sheet, he showed up.”

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