Thursday, November 20th
8:25pm ET @ O. Co Coliseum (NFLN)
Thursday Night Football has shown a trend of featuring division rivalries. This week will feature a very interesting match-up as Kansas City stay in the hunt to take the AFC West and Oakland looks to win their first game and possibly play spoiler.
Kansas City struggled off the bat and I’ll admit that I firmly believed that they would be nowhere near as good as they were last year. Well, they’re sitting pretty at 7-3 and tied for first, with Denver having the tiebreaker. Like last season, Jamaal Charles has put the team on his back and the defense has shinned. Despite losing Brandon Flowers to San Diego during the offseason, Sean Smith and Ron Parker have done just fine and Eric Berry has continued to give great support in the secondary. Dontari Poe, Justin Houston and Tamba Hali continue to wreak havoc up front.
It has been a tough season for Oakland fans. So much promise after the likes of Justin Tuck and Khalil Mack were added to the defensive front but very little has been shown. There have been signs of toughness, especially last week when they got into the very low scoring affair against San Diego. They were able to disrupt an already injured Philip Rivers but it will be a much different story this week as Kansas City is much healthier than San Diego. Derek Carr will need to depend on his line to give him so extra time against a very heavy pass rush. Although we know Oakland is at the bottom of the barrel, they always come out to fight during division games.
FINAL SCORE
Kansas City is currently working on dethroning Denver and Oakland should not be a road block. Carr will likely be forced into making mistakes right out of the gate but don’t expect to have the “Black Hole” sit back. They will be very vibrant as their winless team takes on primetime.
CHIEFS 31-Raiders 14
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