Las Vegas Raiders in for a gut check against the New York Jets

The Las Vegas Raiders need a major bounce-back game against the New York Jets and this game will be a real gut check for the young team.

The Las Vegas Raiders are facing an 0-11 New York Jets team, and they may be tempted to overlook the struggling squad, but they would do so at their own peril. They may have overlooked the Atlanta Falcons, who were a few games below .500, and that may have lead to their embarrassing defeat but no one would admit that after the fact.

Even though the Jets are 0-11, they are still a professional football team with players that have competitive drives and pride will keep them from wanting to be one of the few teams to go 0-16 in an NFL season. No one remembers if a team goes 1-15 or 2-14 but there is a special badge of shame that never goes away for teams that don’t win a single game over the course of a season.

So when the Raiders are preparing for this game, they must not overlook the Jets and they must be ready for a desperate team that will scratch and claw to keep themselves out of the record books.

Sunday will be a gut check for the Raiders

Second year fullback Alec Ingold is well aware of this and knows that the Raiders need to be better to make the playoffs. He told the Las Vegas Review Journal this week:

"“I know it’s a crazy time for all of these guys, but it’s really a gut check for teams that want to be here. Whatever we did last week will not work,” Ingold added. “Now or in the playoffs. So we just can’t do it anymore.”"

Ingold was on the team last year when their season fell apart after a meltdown against the Jets in Week 12 and knows that a repeat of that is not acceptable. Last year the Raiders may have overlooked the Jets who were struggling at the time but had plenty of talent on both sides of the ball and those players punished them for their passiveness.

This year the Jets have considerably less talent after letting go of or trading away players like Le’Veon Bell, Jamal Adams, and Robby Anderson but they still have difference makers like Quinnen Williams and Breshad Perriman who the Raiders will have to be aware of at all times.

The message all week should be that no matter what the Jets’ record is, they are still a team to be respected because anything can happen on any given Sunday.

The playoffs start this week for the Las Vegas Raiders and if they want to make it to the real thing in January they will need to jump on the Jets early and prove that the loss to Atlanta is in the rearview mirror.