The Raiders got found out, and their coach said it first

Drake Maye finished with a passer rating of 150.9. The scale stops at 158.3. That is the whole game, and it is why the argument I have watched Raiders fans have since Sunday night, offence or defence, is not really an argument once you open the box score.

Las Vegas lost 45-17 at New England (NFL.com game book). It was grim, it was painful to watch, and it was the first time this season they have looked like the team most people expected before the year started.

I am not going to pretend otherwise. But there is a difference between a bad night and a bad team, and the numbers are quite specific about which bits were which. Only a week earlier the Raiders went toe to toe with Kansas City and lost by three having outgained them.

How the game went

New England led inside four minutes and were never caught.

Quarter	Raiders	Patriots
Q1	7	14
Q2	0	7
Q3	3	14
Q4	7	10
Final	17	45

Brock Bowers caught a 13-yard touchdown to level it at 7-7 midway through the first quarter.

That was as good as it got. The Patriots scored the next three touchdowns to lead 28-7 early in the third, having gone in 21-7 up at half-time, and after the break the Raiders never got within 18 points.

The argument, settled

Here is the night side by side.

	Raiders	Patriots
Total yards	306	536
Rushing yards	38	165
Third down	5 of 13	6 of 12
Fourth down	0 of 2	2 of 2
Red zone touchdowns	2 of 3	4 of 5
Passer rating	Cousins 106.7	Maye 150.9
Time of possession	25:33	34:27

Kirk Cousins went 19 of 28 for 243 yards and a touchdown without throwing an interception. That is a passer rating of 106.7, which is a good afternoon by any measure. The offence also scored touchdowns on two of its three trips inside the New England 20. Neither of those is the profile of a unit that loses by 28.

Passer rating is the single number that tries to sum up how well a quarterback threw, and it tops out at 158.3 rather than 100, which trips everyone up the first time.

Anything above 100 is a strong day. Maye’s 150.9 is the sort of number a quarterback gets when almost nothing goes wrong: 26 of 34, 374 yards, four touchdowns, no interceptions. I have the full breakdown of what that number rewards and what it quietly ignores in QB stats, decoded.

Five hundred and thirty-six yards. Four touchdowns from five red-zone trips. Two conversions from two attempts on fourth down. The Raiders managed one sack all night, and the club’s own write-up noted that Maxx Crosby and Kwity Paye finished with two tackles between them (Paul Gutierrez, Raiders.com).

The number underneath that is the one that should worry Raiders fans most, because it is the exact thing this team was built on. Maye was pressured on 26.3% of his dropbacks, a season low (The Athletic, subscription). Back in September, the story of this defence was that nobody in the league disrupted quarterbacks more often.

On Sunday the best quarterback they have faced had more time than any of them. Crosby explained how New England managed it: “They chipped and chipped a lot on long passes, and got the ball out quick.”

Nor was the run defence a surprise. It was the fourth game in a row the Raiders have given up more than 120 yards on the ground, and New England ran for 165 at 5.3 a carry.

That is not a bad night. That is a pattern that the first four weeks’ turnovers were covering up. Defence stats, decoded covers which of those numbers matter most.

.@Raiders @Patriots @DrakeMaye2 attacked the Raider Corners from the opening drive…They all got beat….And the protected Drake all game long. This was a "beatdown" by the Patriots #BaldysBreakdowns https://t.co/Ocaj4agPS8

— Brian Baldinger (@BaldyNFL) October 12, 2026

The one thing the offence did lose, and why

There is a real offensive failure in here, the coach has already named it, and it is more interesting than “they played badly”.

The Raiders ran for 38 yards from 18 carries. That is 2.1 yards per attempt. Ashton Jeanty, who went into the game carrying ankle and foot problems and played anyway, finished with 10 for 27 (Sam Warren, The Athletic, subscription).

Kubiak did not hide behind it. “I abandoned the run game too early and didn’t give it a chance to get going,” he said.

The Silver & Black head back to the drawing board heading into Week 6 ⤵️ https://t.co/Ge2KI2Nkvw

— Las Vegas Raiders (@Raiders) October 12, 2026

Here is why that matters more than it sounds, and it is the best thing I learned all week. Giving up on the run does not just cost you rushing yards. It costs you the threat of the run, and that threat is what makes play-action work. Play-action is the fake handoff: the quarterback pretends to give the ball to the running back, the defence hesitates for half a second, and receivers come open behind them. It only works if the defence genuinely fears the run.

Against New England, just 9.7% of Cousins’ dropbacks involved a play-fake. In each of the first four games that figure never fell below 26.5% (The Athletic, citing TruMedia). The single most reliable tool in this offence all season was used roughly a third as often, because the thing it depends on had been put away.

The rest follows. Cousins was sacked three times, a season high, and pressured on 38.7% of his dropbacks, the third-highest rate he has faced this year. Drives died, possession finished 25:33 against 34:27, and a defence that was already losing badly got no rest at all.

So both units, but not equally, and not independently. The defence lost this game. The decision to stop running is why the offence could not help it.

That is worth holding next to last week. Against Kansas City the Raiders kept the ball for 35:42 and lost by three. This week they kept it for 25:33 and lost by 28. Two opposite failures, a week apart, which is a reminder that no single number tells you who won. Team stats, decoded goes through which ones actually predict results.

Fernando Mendoza’s first NFL snaps

With 6:06 left and 28 points down in the rain, Klint Kubiak sent on the first overall pick in this year’s draft. Mendoza went 6 of 8 for 48 yards across ten snaps and moved the offence from his own 35 to the New England 14 before a scramble on fourth-and-four ended it.

He was blunt about that last play: “That is totally my fault,” he said, adding that he “let the offense down on that play.” He also said he was “really proud of how the offense rallied, even late in the game”, and that “if, in the future, I am called upon, I have at least a little experience. Rather than none.”

Kubiak kept it plain. “Just wanted to get him some exposure,” he said. “All reps are valuable. Very important for him.” He was clear it does not make Mendoza the starter.

Nothing about ten snaps against a defence protecting a 28-point lead tells you what a quarterback will become. But a 22-year-old taking responsibility for his own mistake in his first professional outing tells you something about the person, and I liked it.

.@Raiders rookie QB Fernando Mendoza played well in his brief NFL debut. But his accountability on a throw he didn’t make stood out about the rookie. My story: https://t.co/8YopQUcymK

— Vincent Bonsignore (@VinnyBonsignore) October 12, 2026

Why I am not worried about coach Kubiak

This is the bit where I put my cards down. I think Kubiak is doing a good job and I think he deserves considerably more than five games before anyone decides otherwise.

Start with how he handled Sunday. “Very disappointing performance from everybody: players and coaches,” he said. “We have to move forward from it very quickly. We have everything ahead of us as a team. We’re not happy about what happened today, and we have to go do something about it.” Then he named his own mistakes without being cornered into it: abandoning the run, and a reverse to Tre Tucker that fooled nobody and killed a promising second-quarter drive.

I have watched enough sport to know how rare that is. The ordinary version of this press conference blames execution, or the officials, or nothing at all. A coach who tells you which of his own calls went wrong, two days after his team were beaten by 28, is a coach who knows what he is looking at.

He inherited a team that held the first overall pick in this year’s draft, which the Raiders spent on Fernando Mendoza (Yahoo Sports). Five weeks later they are 3-2. He has got that far with a run game that produced 38 yards on Sunday and a receiving group where the drop-off after Bowers is a cliff. Bowers, for the record, had another eight catches for 110 yards in a game where nothing else worked.

A beating like this is also information. You cannot fix what you have not yet been shown, and Sunday showed them a great deal at once: the pass defence against a quarterback in form, the run game, the missed tackles, what happens when the margins stop falling their way. Better to learn it in October at 3-2 than in December with something riding on it.

Where the Raiders sit now

3-2, which given where this franchise was twelve months ago is a perfectly respectable place to be in the second week of October. Kansas City remain unbeaten and top of the AFC West, Denver are level with the Raiders, and the Chargers are still looking for their first win. The NFL play-offs and seeding explains what a record like that is actually worth once January arrives.

The rest of the league week 5

Week 5 had plenty beyond Foxborough, and I have written it all up in the full Week 5 roundup across the league.

What a beating is for: learnings

If you are new to following a team properly, this is the week that teaches you the most. A close win tells you very little, because everything looked like it worked. A 28-point beating hands you a list.

The Raiders now have theirs, and it is short and specific: run the ball and keep running it, stop giving up 120 yards on the ground every week, find somebody who can catch it other than Brock Bowers. None of that was invisible before Sunday. It is just that nobody could ignore it afterwards.

They will find out quickly whether the list gets worked through. Sunday was the first of a seven-game run in which six of the opponents reached the play-offs last season. NFL Week 6 see’s us up against the Bills.

So Raider Nation, how are you feeling about the next two weeks after watching Bills-Rams?

— Sam Warren (@samwarren83) October 13, 2026

Maxx Crosby, who has seen a few of these, put it about right: “You can feel like the best team in the world one week and the next week it could be real tough.”