Raiders know they dodged a premature end to season by beating Browns in OT

OAKLAND -- The Raiders hadn't been as dreadful as their record suggested after three defeats, so it stands to reason that they wouldn’t be as good as their first win suggests they could be, either.

They are, in short, a 1-3 team that could with a lot of hard work and devotion be . . . oh, probably 1-3. But an intriguing 1-3, if such a thing can be.

Or to leave it to the experts, coach Jon Gruden, who has been on the defensive since the day he freed Khalil Mack into his true place in the universe, opted not to declare Sunday’s 45-42 overtime win over the Cleveland Browns the turning of the corner.

“We haven’t fixed anything yet,” Gruden said after rookie kicker Matt McCrane ended Sunday's marathon with a game-winning 29-yard field goal. “We’ve got a long way to go, plenty of things we need to do better. We closed out the first quarter with something, so at least we got that, but there’s so much that needs to be fixed.”

And in truth, there’s so much that won’t be fixed this year. That’s how 1-3 teams happen -- just good enough often enough to not be terrible all the time.

So it was Sunday, where the Raiders were punching uphill more often than not, trailing as they did 17-7, 28-14 and then 42-34 with 4:20 to go. They rattled Browns rookie quarterback Baker Mayfield for one extended stretch in the third quarter but couldn’t keep tabs on him at all in other periods and missed entirely on running back Nick Chubb.

Offensively, quarterback Derek Carr was erratic and frustrating as always, his career morphing in and out of Matt Stafford-hood three different times, but he also found ways to incorporate a full distribution pattern to his receiving corps, as well as allowing running back Marshawn Lynch to be his bullheaded and prolific best (20 carries for 130 yards, 78 of them fist-in-the-face difficult). Carr might end up being that exasperating middle-of-the-road quarterback who spends his entire career breaking your heart with one hand and mending it with the other, but rarely does he do so as often as he did Sunday.

And then there was McCrane himself, making his debut on the Coliseum dirt and failing enough (from 47 and 50 yards) to make his ultimate success in overtime a memory worth savoring.

“After I missed from 50 (with 6:14 left in overtime) and I was going out for the last one, I heard Derek tell Coach Gruden, ‘We have a lot of confidence in him, he can do this,’ ” McCrane, who looks every bit of 11 years old, said. “So that helped. I was confident as I’ve ever been. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure if we’d won the game. I guess I have to study up on the rules.”

As for Gruden, considering McCrane, rookie long snapper Trent Sieg and rookie holder Johnny Townsend were the ones who handled the ball on the game-winner, he said with that grimacey smile, “I’ve been as nervous as I was for one 29-yard field goal.”

But Gruden, as relieved as he was, knows he's taking this team on its journey via the most exasperating and least direct route. He has opted against a quick fix, so there will be more white-knuckle days like this.

As many ways that the Raiders could have taken this game and run with it, Gruden also knew how many times they spit it up as well. They had scored just three points in their prior fourth quarters and 17 in their first three second halves, but between their own stick-to-it-iveness and Cleveland’s extraordinary bungling in defense of their leads, they got three touchdowns in the fourth quarter Sunday and 31 points overall.

In short, the Raiders had a grand opportunity to see 2018 as a lost cause and decided not to abandon it fully yet. At 1-3, they are painfully deficient in too many areas, most notably consistent performance, but at 0-4, they would have been playing the rest of the season before a combination of empty seats and angry seat-fillers, which is no way for a team that is lurching through the earliest part of a full-on rebuild to maintain its equilibrium. They heard the formidable wall of boos as they stood at the precipice Sunday, and pulled themselves back at the last moment.

There won’t be a lot more of those permitted, but they left the Coliseum on Sunday knowing they’d dodged a premature but very soul-crushing end to their season. They cheated permanent local hatred, but they’re only one-fourth through a long and difficult transition that will take them through this year and next, learning face-first so that they can be the ones teaching the lessons come the start of the new decade.

Which for Raiders fans is as consoling as the knowledge that Mack was brilliant for the Bears again. In other words, other than winning today's game, not much at all.

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