They are better than they've been for years, you can see it almost every week of Raiders football.
It's there. It's tangible. It isn't fake.
They're not good enough, though.
Not yet, not now, and definitely not last Sunday, when the Raiders faced another good NFL team and the Raiders lost to another good NFL team.
You can boil down the Raiders' 30-14 loss to Minnesota about a thousand different ways, and I'm sure everybody associated with the franchise will do exactly that.
You can talk about the gut-punch kickoff return touchdown the Raiders allowed at the end of the first half, right after they'd rallied back to take the lead.
You can point to the slow start, to the penalties, to quarterback Derek Carr's first wobbly game in more than a month, or to Vikings tailback Adrian Peterson splicing through the Raiders defense at several key moments.
It's all of those things, it's everything, and this is the fifth time in nine games that it has happened.
Simple summary: The Raiders are 4-5 and have beaten every bad team on their schedule.
Also, they have lost to every good team they've played.
The Raiders aren't bad. Which is no small accomplishment given the circumstances of the last decade or so.
But they aren't yet good -- they make just the wrong mistakes at just the wrong time against the teams that can take advantage of every single one, such as Cordarrelle Patterson's 93-yard return off a Sebastian Janikowski squib kick.
Which might get pretty frustrating for the locker room and coaching staff, eventually.
But right now, everybody involved is determined to keep things in the proper perspective.
The Raiders are young at key spots, and they aren't bad.
If you're ever going to get good, first, you can't be bad.
"We're still even-keel," left tackle Donald Penn said Sunday. "We lost a game. We're not about to go crazy about it. We lost a game. I'm upset. Yes I'm very upset. But it's one game.
"We're going to go to Chapter 10 (of the season) tomorrow. There's no panic at all. There's none of that at all. Positive, upbeat."
Here's who the Raiders have defeated this season: the Ravens (currently 2-7), the Browns (2-8), the Chargers (2-7) and the Jets (5-4, the only current winning team the Raiders have beaten).
Here's who the Raiders have lost to this season: the Vikings (now 7-2), the Bengals (8-0), the Broncos (7-2), the Steelers (6-4) and the Bears (4-5), the only current team with a losing record to have beaten the Raiders.
Here's who the Raiders have coming up: road games against Detroit (currently 2-7) and Tennessee (also 2-7), so you know where this might be headed.
That's if the pattern holds, and I guess my whole point is that the Raiders season so far is all pattern, no variance.
The Raiders don't get too full of themselves after a few victories -- like winning consecutive games recently.
And they don't get crushed by bitter losses -- like the close home loss to Denver or the Week 1 demolition by Cincinnati.
Or Sunday's game, when the Vikings were a little bit better than the Raiders in every phase, including coaching.
"We've got plenty of bounce-back in us," Raiders coach Jack Del Rio said. "We've got a good group in terms of being resilient, I don't think there's any question about that. There's a lot of football ahead of us."
They're good enough to win their next two, and get to 6-5. That is the 2015 Raiders pattern, and by the next few weeks they should and could be right back in the playoff race.
So there's no reason for the Raiders to douse the season, and that was the locker room mood Sunday.
But in three weeks it starts to get tougher again -- Kansas City, Denver and Green Bay.
"We've still got a lot of games to play, so we're not getting down on this," safety Nate Allen said.
"We're still in it. We've just got to bounce back. It's a one-game league; we've just got to move on to the next one."
There is every reason to think that this team is probably destined for 8-8 ... or 9-7 if the Raiders can pick off one of their tougher opponents.
Again, that's obviously a strong step forward from last season's 3-13 debacle, and that's enough for this locker room to believe it can take one more big step soon.
Until then, the Raiders are exactly what their record says they are, 4-5, intriguing in spots, predictable most of the time, and just not good enough. Yet.
About the Author
