Khalil Mack is an elite pass rusher. Or at least he has been at times in his career. That wasn’t looking like the case over the first three games of this season. In those games, the 32-year-old edge rusher had no sacks and just 11 pressures.
Then the Raiders came to town. And suddenly, even without Joey Bosa in the lineup to help out from the opposite side, Mack exploded for 10 pressures and six sacks.
Buy Raiders TicketsYes, he had nearly as many pressures in one game as he had the previous three games. And his six sacks moved him from a tie for the fewest sacks in the league (0) to a tie for the most. One. Game.
How could this happen? I asked McDaniels that question after the game and this was his response:
“He’s a great player. There was a number of snaps where there was multiple people on him and him only,” McDaniels said of Mack, adding that he would need to look at the film before commenting on specifics.
“We jammed him, chipped him, hit him in the ribs. We did everything we could do to try to disrupt him with another player and then we had a tackle obviously assigned to him as well. He had a great day and we were trying to put people over there on the right side for the most part, that’s where he was and he did better than we did, clearly.”
Ok, so they put multiple people on Mack “a number of times”. What number though?
Two. The number is two.
That’s how many times Zebra Technologies Next Gen Stats counted the Raiders double-teamed Mack on his pass rushes.
Hardly what one would call doing “everything we could do to try to disrupt him”.
None of Mack’s sacks came against a double team. And only one of them did he even face an attempted chip. That was Mack’s sixth and final sack where Jakob Johnson looked like he tried to bump Mack a little bit on his way by, but Mack sidestepped it easily and Johnson ran a few yards and turned around as a receiver. By then Mack had gotten around Jermaine Eluemunor and had Aidan O’Connell in his clutches.
I guess, what it comes down to is this; First of all, the Raiders absolutely did not do everything they could do to stop Mack. And second of all, they failed miserably at their supposed best shot. Neither is good.
