Las Vegas Raiders: 3 keys to victory over the New York Jets
Win the turnover battle
The most obvious key to winning most games in the NFL is winning the battle for turnover differential. According to Pro-Football-Reference, in the first two wins of the season, the Raiders had only one single turnover. Since then they have gifted the opposing team the ball a total of 14 times and have only taken the ball away 11 times, bringing their differential to -3, which is bad enough to be placed 23rd overall in that category.
Hard to win games win you give up the ball more than you are taking it away.
Now, the team as a whole is of course to blame for this. The defense is not getting enough pressure on the quarterback to create turnovers, as they have only racked up a total of five forced fumbles all season, three of which were recovered.
That’s pretty much bottom of the barrel in those categories, and the secondary has not really been outstanding either. Paul Guenther is playing off coverage of the defensive backs too much at times, which has not given the pass rush enough time to get after the quarterback and enable the secondary to create more takeaways.
However, the defense still has recorded nine interceptions on the year, which is the middle of the pack, so they are playing opportunistic defense at times. The Raiders are getting ready to face the worst offense in the league, and performance like what was seen against Denver in Week 10 should be in store from this unit.