How the Raiders Found What They Had Been Missing

"This is what we've been missing, it can't be more obvious. You can see Brock [Bowers] is such a good football player. This is what we watched all summer-long and offseason, those guys hooking up. It just makes everything better. You have a go-to guy. I thought Geno [Smith] played a great football game today,” Carroll said.

“He played excellently under the pressure of it and trying to finish it. Like you said, 9-9 in the fourth quarter, that's what we know. The things that we saw earlier in the year when we were trying to patch together just didn't seem like that was the character of the team that we would be. I think this is a glimpse of what our future is about. Let's see if we can't get this thing rolling." 

Following the loss, Raiders quarterback Geno Smith echoed a similar sentiment. Smith finished with 284 passing yards, nearly half of which went to Bowers. The performance Bowers put on display confirmed how badly Las Vegas needs him to be healthy moving forward.

"Yeah, having Brock [Bowers] out there, he's one of the best players on our team, one of the best players in the NFL. He just makes my job so easy, he does everything so well. He made some phenomenal catches today, a lot of those catches a lot of guys don't make. You can just see his impact on the game when he's out there,” Smith said.

“He's such a phenomenal, such a dynamic player. At one point they were double teaming him, triple teaming him, trying to stop him, and that just opens up the field for the rest of the guys, the other guys get one on ones. You can see when you got that big chess piece, how coordinators got to call games, and how we can call games as well."