The Raiders’ ground game found a new low on Sunday, and Ashton Jeanty was right in the middle of it.
In the loss to the 49ers, the running back the Raiders took with the sixth overall pick last year finished with five catches for negative-five yards, a line that reads more like a typo than a stat. Kirk Cousins targeted Jeanty seven times, and the sequence was brutal: incomplete, 3 yards, 3 yards, incomplete, -3 yards, -7 yards, -1 yard.
That kind of receiving day is almost impossible to stumble into. Jeanty’s five catches for -5 yards are the second-worst performance ever for a player with at least five receptions in a game.
The only player to finish with fewer yards was Jamie Caleb of the 1960 Browns, who somehow put up five catches for -18 yards. Caleb’s career numbers make the oddity even stranger: seven catches for -26 yards.
Jeanty wasn’t the only Raiders back struggling to get anything moving. He led the team on the ground with 25 yards on six carries, while Mike Washington added six carries for negative-three yards. Put the two together, and the Raiders got 17 touches for 17 yards from their running backs.
The bigger picture is just as ugly. Through the season, the Raiders have 222 rushing attempts for 642 yards, a 2.89 yards-per-carry average.
That leaves them as the only NFL team averaging fewer than three yards per carry. When the ball goes to the Raiders’ running backs, nothing is working.
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