by David Zizmor

ALAMEDA–Oakland Raiders quarterback Matt Schaub needs some work, it’s a tough situation that the Raiders are in and they really don’t have a quarterback that they can throw out there with any confidence. They made a point of going out there and getting Schaub thinking that last year he’d be a pretty good quaterback and for several years he was good for the Hoston Texans until last season when he had a horrendous season.

Whatever happened last year could be cured with with a change of scenery, as you remember last season he had hundreds of interceptions and then he had a weird consecutive of games with interceptions returned for touchdowns which tied for an NFL record for both consecutive games with an interception returned for a touchdown.

So for Schaub it just kind of snowballed, in all fairness it’s not just Schaub’s fault, when he was with Texas the team just completely went into the tank, last season they gave up at the end of the year which resulted in a complete change of coaching staff. A large number of players were traded from that Texas team. Schaub was in a bad situation in Houston last year and everything just went wrong.

Schaub got a lot of the blame for last season and the Raiders were hoping that a lot of that blame would be replaced with the understanding with that “yeah he had a lot of bad games but there were bigger problems in Houston that resulted in looking pretty bad.” This first pre season game was not what you want to see, it didn’t look particularly good.

Schaub got sacked right out of the gate he threw for 3-7 for 21 yards and granted he didn’t play that long he was in there long enough to get seven passes and as we all know in the pre season your not putting your A game out there so their not necessarily running their plays that are designed to be successful the Vikings were just trying to get out there and get the rust off.

Friday being the very first pre season game for the Raiders it’s perfectly understandable things don’t go exactly as planned. You don’t want to see your guy looking rusty either. By the look of things Schaub has a little more work to do and he needs to get the rust off. He didn’t look particularly strong. He was sacked once and there is a big concern for what kind of protection he might get this year.

You get a little worried when you get a guy throwing interceptions all last year he didn’t throw one on Friday but was sacked. You don’t want to see that. The Raiders don’t want to put too much stock into all of this because this is the first game of the pre season. However the Raiders have to be a tiny bit worried that Schaub didn’t look particularly good.

David Zizmor covers the NFL for http://www.sportsradioservice.com