Tag: Russell Wilson

NAPA–With the players trying out at the Raiders camp in Napa it is a full on 100 percent competition for pretty much every single position on the field and that’s including quarterback. Matt Flynn is the Raiders presumptive choice at QB unless Terrelle Pryor beats him out. Comparing them to the 49ers your going to see the starters from one to 82 series. With the Raiders your going to see the presumptive starters or at least a quarter maybe two because the Raiders really don’t know who is who it could be anybody.

So what you have to do is watch every single player on the field they’re all potential starters maybe you can say Darren McFadden is a sure thing but your not going to see a lot of him because they don’t want him getting hurt in the early pre season with that injury history. All across the field just look at every single position look at how well they perform and how much passion they play with. That’s probably the big part of the Raiders philosophy this year.

For the Raiders they just don’t want good players they want players who play hard that’s something they struggled with at times last year. So whether it’s the offense or the defense your just looking for guys to stand out. It’s not the same as the 49ers the 49ers have guys on their team who you know who are going to be the starters. Justin Smith is not all of a sudden going to be benched neither is Colon Kaepernick, or Frank Gore.

With the Raiders there is no such thing as a sure thing on this team anybody can get a starting position and anyone could lose a starting position which means pre season might be a little exciting because you don’t know whose going to emerge. So your going to have to watch at least the first half of these Raiders games to see how well they do. If someone starts to perform well in game one against the Cowboys in pre season and continues that into game two they could become your next starter.

At this stage it’s anybody’s guess as to who those players will be but for right now the Raiders are going to give everyone on that squad a chance to emerge as a contributor potentially a star and certainly as a starter and we’ll have to wait to see with the Raiders it’s going to go game to game as they approach it but it will be fun to watch.

On the quarterback front it’s the assumption that Matt Flynn will be Oakland’s starting quarterback I don’t think the Raiders went out to get him with the intent of benching him. He’s not a cheap player and he’s not super expensive either but he’s not cheap by Raiders standards anyways. So you have to assume that the Raiders wouldn’t have traded for him if they didn’t want to start him but remember the Seattle Seahawks traded for Lynn last year and he ended up getting benched as Russell Wilson started the season for the Seahawks and Flynn never saw very much time on the field.

The same thing could happen to him here we don’t know and that all depends on the quality of the backup and depends on how Terrelle Pryor plays and if Pryor comes in and starts lighting things up he could do the same thing. The difference is we’ve seen Pryor a little bit and it doesn’t seem like he has Wilson’s ability to command an offense it’s a huge difference. It’s not something they take lightly.

That’s why Pryor will not be the starter this season in Oakland but with Flynn we don’t know what his ability is over the course of a season if this is a guy whose only started a couple of games in injury situations and while he does well in those we haven’t seen him in the course of eight, or nine, ten games to really judge what he can really do over the course of time. So if he plays a couple of games and starts to falter and continues to falter then you might see Pryor get a chance at some point during the season.

Getting named the starter for game one this Friday against the Broncos is not going to insure that the Raiders starter will be the starter in game ten of the NFL season. It’s going to be a week to week proposition as it will be with most players on the Raiders, it’s going to be a performance issue. You have to keep performing to prove yourself from week to week in order to maintain your starting job. So that applies to the quarterback position, you don’t like that to be the case because you want your quarterback to be as rock solid as possible but that’s not the position the Raiders are in.

David Zizmor covers the NFL for Sportstalk Radio