'New Raiders' stun Eagles 13-9 with a solid all-around effort

By Steve Corkran
Contra Costa Times

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OAKLAND — Oakland Raiders coach Tom Cable challenged his players to take the fight to the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday.

Take your best shot, go down swinging, see what happens.

What transpired defied logic. The on-the-ropes Raiders — losers of three straight by a combined 80 points — delivered a technical knockout of the 3-1 and seemingly rising Eagles with a 13-9 victory at the half-empty Oakland Coliseum.

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"We went out and threw a fight on somebody and said, 'Enough, let's play,' " Cable said afterward. "That's all you can say. There are no magic words or anything like that."

More impressive, the game wasn't near as competitive as the score indicated. The Raiders came out swinging, kept up the pressure and forced the Eagles into submission with a balanced offense and a new-look defense.

The Raiders turned the tables on an Eagles team that blitzed more often than any other through the first five weeks. They blitzed quarterback Donovan McNabb time and again, with great results.

Defensive end Trevor Scott and defensive lineman Richard Seymour combined for four of Oakland's six sacks and spearheaded a defensive attack that confounded McNabb and the Eagles for most of the game.

"New Raiders, baby," Raiders defensive tackle Gerard Warren said. "Fido: Forget it, drive on. It's called Fido. You saw Raiders' defensive philosophy: control the run and pressure the quarterback. That's what we've been preaching all year."

The preaching fell on deaf ears, by all accounts. Defensive coordinator John Marshall implemented his scheme in the offseason, and it was what he intended to use.

Without much warning, Marshall altered his scheme in practice last week and inserted an array of blitzes and coverages for which players long have been lobbying.

"(Marshall) came up with a scheme in which we haven't seen," McNabb said. "They're known for playing man coverage. They dropped back in a lot of zone, more zone than we've seen in the early games."

The Raiders used more zone, mixed in some cover-2 and kept McNabb guessing from down to down. Lo and behold, it worked. The Eagles failed to get inside the Raiders' 15-yard line the entire game and finished almost 23 points shy of their average.

Raiders cornerback Nnamdi Asomugha said he hounds Marshall every Monday about cranking up the pressure, mixing up the coverages and ditching a scheme that bordered on predictable.

"He said he was going to do it," Asomugha said. "Maybe he'll see that it actually works, and we'll stick on it. He said that he might get yelled at for it, but he'll keep it going."

Raiders managing general partner Al Davis is a fond proponent of employing man-to-man coverage and relying upon the four defensive linemen to generate pressure on the quarterback.

The Raiders were so dominant defensively that perhaps Davis might consider signing off on a new-look approach. They held an opponent without a touchdown for the first time in 48 games, the equivalent of three seasons.

"All the cover-2 and all that stuff, we were shocked," Asomugha said, "because (coaches) say that we're going to run it in practice, but we come to a game and that never happens. So, now the first time that they really did it, it actually worked."

The Raiders finally found a few things that worked offensively, too. They entered the game last in the league in average yards per game and second-to-last in average points per game.

Scoring points still proved problematical, but the 13 were only three shy of their total the past three games combined. They were enough the way their defensive mates played.