Raiders Week 6: The defence is the worst in four years. The team is the best in four years.

The Raiders outgained Buffalo and lost by three. Three hundred and seventy-eight yards to three hundred and forty-five, thirty points on the board against the team with the best record in the AFC, and it still went down as a third straight defeat (Raiders.com).

So this week I did something I have not done before, but should have done a while ago. I pulled the game logs for the last four seasons and lined them up. I expected the defence to come out looking like the problem. It does. What I did not expect is that the same six games contain the best Raiders start of the four.

It is not a good run. But the Raiders are losing close, not losing badly, and that is more than the last three seasons could say.

How the Bills vs Raiders game went

Buffalo 33, Las Vegas 30, at Allegiant Stadium on Sunday 18 October (Raiders.com). Kirk Cousins threw for 313 yards and two touchdowns, the second a 44-yard strike to Tre Tucker with 92 seconds left that cut it to three (Raiders.com by the numbers).

The margin came from the bits that do not show up there. Tyler Linderbaum’s false start on fourth and short was his third penalty in that situation this season, and it turned a go for it into a field goal attempt in the red zone (Raiders.com). Lose by three, leave three on the field, and the arithmetic does itself.

The other one was a coverage bust. On the Just Win podcast, Ted Nguyen and Marshall Newhouse walked through the James Cook touchdown: a fake handoff pulled the defender covering Cook out of position, Cook ran straight into the flat, and nobody was near him. A play fake is exactly what it sounds like, the quarterback pretending to hand the ball off so the defence commits to a run that never happens, and it works on defenders who are already straining to stop the run. Which these ones were. If that mechanism is new to you, how the offence works is the place to start.

Nine takeaways, and then one

Here is the number the season turns on. In the first three games the defence took the ball away nine times. In the last three it has taken it away once.

Nothing else about the defence changed much. The points did.

A takeaway is simply the defence getting the ball back by force, an interception or a recovered fumble, and it is the single most valuable thing a defence can do because it ends a drive and starts one. Through five games the Raiders had the second most in the NFL (ESPN). After a Buffalo game with none, they are fifth (Pro Football Reference). Still good. Just no longer carrying the whole thing.

Maxx Crosby put it plainly after the game: “Guys are hunting the ball. We’ve got to do a better job of taking the ball away” (Raiders.com).

Four seasons of Raiders defences

This is the bit I will be updating every month from now on. Same six games, four seasons, defence only.

Read the Yds column first. This defence is giving up 371.7 yards a game, which is more than the 2025 side that finished 3-14 and more than the 2024 side that finished 4-13. It is the worst of the four by a distance, and it is not close enough to argue about.

Now read the one next to it. Twenty-seven points a game scored, against sixteen, eighteen and seventeen in the three years before. Level on points difference after six games, when the same point in 2024 was minus fifty-four. The offence is doing something the last three Raiders teams could not do at all.

That is the honest shape of this season, and it is why “close isn’t good enough” is both true and the best sentence a Raiders player has said in three years. Being close is new.

One caution on the week-by-week version of this, because I nearly fooled myself with it. Week numbers line up across seasons, opponents do not. Week 6 this year was Josh Allen. Week 6 last year was the Titans. A line that goes up and down across four seasons is partly measuring the fixture list, so the season-to-date table above is the one that holds, and the week-by-week one is for shape.

What people are watching

Four things worth your time from the week, none of them mine.

Dov Kleiman called it the filthiest route you will ever see, and the clip has been everywhere since. What it is, is a blaze out. Brock Bowers sells an in-breaking route with his shoulders and his head, holds his body at the same level through the break so the corner reads dig, then cuts ninety degrees the other way and leaves him standing.

Brock Bowers is the best TE in the NFL. One of the filthiest routes you will ever see. https://t.co/IvUEsI95Ol

— Dov Kleiman (@NFL_DovKleiman) October 19, 2026

Ted Nguyen’s point on the podcast was that this is a wide receiver’s route, the one Julio Jones made famous, and that he had tweeted asking to see Bowers run it roughly three minutes before Bowers ran it.

He and Newhouse attached a less enjoyable observation to it: Bowers caught nothing at all in the first half, because Christian Benford and a bracket took him away, and the Raiders had nobody else to turn to.

JJ Watt broke down Maxx Crosby’s pass rush on the CBS broadcast, clipped and posted by NFL on CBS. Worth it for how clearly he shows the double team. Crosby has been chipped 36 times this season, fifth most in the league, and faces a double team on 10.1% of his rushes (ESPN).

"This is a fantastic job by Maxx Crosby…" @JJWatt breaking down pass rush tape 🍿 https://t.co/3lb32NReBM

— NFL on CBS 🏈 (@NFLonCBS) October 18, 2026

The NFL posted the Tucker touchdown, which is the throw people will remember. Nguyen and Newhouse both made the same point about it on the podcast, that Cousins can still make that throw when the pocket is clean, and that the Raiders have not asked him to often enough.

THE DIME. THE TD CATCH. 🔥 BUFvsLV on CBS/Paramount+ Stream on @NFLPlus https://t.co/rFEtcaZEoZ

— NFL (@NFL) October 18, 2026

And Ryan McFadden’s five takeaways at ESPN is the most useful thing written about the defence this month, though note it was filed on 17 October, before the Bills game, so its record and league ranks are a week out of date. Its point about the young secondary stands: rookie corner Hezekiah Masses, who won AFC Defensive Player of the Week in Week 2, had allowed nine catches for 155 yards and two touchdowns in the three games after it.

There is a quarterback conversation running alongside all this. Kevin Patra has Cousins on NFL.com’s list of starters at risk, with Fernando Mendoza the obvious successor. I am not in a hurry. Cousins is tied for the league lead with 14 touchdown passes (Raiders.com), and the table above says the offence is the thing that is working.

Where they sit now: Week 6 Standings

Third, and the only team in the division other than Kansas City not carrying a negative points difference. If you want to know why 3-3 in this division is a different thing from 3-3 in another one, conferences and divisions explains how the groupings work, and play-offs and seeding covers what a record like this is actually worth in January.

The rest of the league had its own week, and I have written all of it up in the full Week 6 roundup.

What the tracker is for

There is one question I have never been able to answer about this team: is it getting better? Every week produces an opinion and every opinion is about the last three hours.

So from this month the four-season table goes in every month, and the thing I am watching in it is not points allowed, which moves with the fixture list, but the yards column against the takeaway column.

If the yards come down, this is a defence that improved. If the takeaways come back instead, it is the same defence having a better month. Those are different futures and the table will tell them apart long before I can.

Next for the Raiders is the Rams, who are 2-4 (Pro Football Reference). If the numbers above went past you, defence decoded covers what each unit is actually trying to do, and the defence stats page is refreshed every Tuesday.

Roll on NFL Week 7 and lets hope we see the yards come down Raider Nation!