Chip Kelly had one of his best weeks as offensive coordinator of the Raiders on Sunday, but at the midway point of the season he still has plenty of critics.
One of those critics might be head coach Pete Carroll and as others have pointed out, flagship host Q Myers acknowledged on Tuesday that Carroll and Kelly have seemed to be on slightly different pages in the first two months of the season.
In short, Carroll wants to run the ball a lot, and Kelly hasn’t been doing that.
“It just seems like to me that maybe Chip Kelly is not quite calling the game that Pete Carroll is looking for,” Myers said on Raider Nation Radio’s Unnecessary Roughness. “You know what I mean? I’m not sure. It’s just something from the outside looking in, it seems like they’re not, to me, on the same page with the way that they want to execute things.”
Kelly’s offense had been sputtering until week 9 against the Jacksonville Jaguars and it will be interesting to see what the gameplan looks like on Thursday against the Denver Broncos.
Former Raiders’ offensive lineman Lincoln Kennedy has offered quite a few critiques of Kelly’s offense since the start of the season, but he hasn’t lost hope in the veteran coordinator.
In Kennedy’s view, it’s hard to grade Kelly’s body of work this year because the offense has been marred so badly by injuries.
“I think there’s something to be said about [Kelly and Carroll], but I also think the inconsistencies that you’ve had with the offense, the injuries that you’ve had with the valuable players [like] Brock Bowers… have really set it apart,” Kennedy said. “We haven’t really seen the true identity of this team because we haven’t had the players available to really instill what we thought we were going to see in the beginning of the season.”
With Bowers back in week 9, the Raiders finally had a playmaker on the field other than Ashton Jeanty – and if Sunday was any indication, Bowers is probably in line for a big finish to the season.
Jakobi Meyers is no longer with the team and Bowers has clearly become Geno Smith’s most trusted target.
Looking ahead, go ahead and grab Bowers in every fantasy football league that you can. If the offense under Kelly isn’t going to go through Jeanty, it seemed pretty obvious this week who is going to be the focal point of the offense going forward.
x: @raidersbeat
