Las Vegas Raiders at Carolina Panthers: 3 Things We Learned

Las Vegas Raiders at Carolina Panthers: 3 Things We Learned

Big Learning Curve for Defense

On the opposite side of the ball, it was not as great of a start as the Raider defense struggled most of the day. The Panthers actually out-gained the Raiders 388 to 372 and only punted the ball twice all game.

With so many new starters on defense, this wasn’t a surprising performance, but Paul Guenther certainly will have his work cut out for him moving forward.

Many of the same issues the Raiders had last year crept up in this game. They got one sack from Maurice Hurst but overall did not pressure Teddy Bridgewater and allowed him to step up comfortably in the pocket way too many times. And the young secondary got all it could handle with a few blown coverages. Though it was nice to see Johnathan Abram lay the wood on people all game with a team-high 13 tackles.

And despite an overall poor performance, the Raiders came up big at the end with the game-winning stop on fourth down with just over a minute left in the game. It was a terrible play call by Carolina, but that isn’t the Raiders problem as they did what they needed to do to secure the win.

We’ll hopefully get a quick update on the Nick Kwiatkoski injury as that could be a significant loss as he was the play-caller on defense.  He left with a pectoral injury and did not return, having to watch the remainder of the game from the sidelines.

There’s a ton to improve on for this defense, but as we said, this was to be expected with so many new and young starters.