Raiders Klint Kubiak has 3-word response to running back dilemma
Mike Washington Jr.carried the ball 25 times for the Raiders last Sunday.
Ashton Jeanty got it twice.If you’re wondering how the sixth pick in the 2025 NFL Draft ended up on the short end of that deal, you have company.Was it a one-game thing? Did Jeanty’s comments about the Jets during the week cost him carries against them? Or did Washington do enough in a win the Raiders badly needed to make this the new arrangement?Klint Kubiak chalked it up to the way the game unfolded.
Asked later whether he sees the split as a week-to-week proposition, the Raiders coach needed three words.“I do.Yes.”That leaves plenty of room for Washington, and it should.
He gave the Raiders 83 yards on a day they snapped a four-game losing streak.He also needed 25 carries to get there.
At 3.3 yards a pop, Washington played well enough to earn more work.He hardly played so well that the Raiders ought to kick Jeanty to the curb.And before anyone with an itchy trigger finger declares Jeanty a bust and calls for the Raiders to move on, can we go back to what happened just before the season opener? Jeanty went down with an ankle injury that looked serious enough that teammates got on their knees to pray for him.We’d be naive to assume that because Jeanty got back on the field, the ankle sprain stopped taking a toll.
There’s healthy enough to walk, jump and cut.Then there’s NFL healthy, which, in Jeanty’s line of work, means planting that foot in the ground and exploding through a hole before a linebacker can close it.
The difference might be a fraction of a second.For a running back who hung his hat on what he could do in that fraction of a second, it’s a pretty big deal.Remember what convinced the Raiders to take him sixth overall in the first place.
Every argument the analytics crowd makes about the bad business of drafting a running back that high applied to them, too.They did it anyway because Jeanty had the kind of burst that could turn a well-blocked 5-yard run in...