Raiders do their best to avoid scoreboard-watching
DENVER — Raiders quarterback Derek Carr didn’t plan to do a whole lot of scoreboard watching despite how important the outcome of several other games were to his team’s postseason fate on Sunday.
It just kind of happened.
“I was actually looking up to find timeouts and time remaining and sure enough the score of that (Tennessee) game was in big bold letters,” Carr said after the Raiders’ 16-15 season-ending loss to the Broncos at Empower Field at Mile High.
The Titans put the finishing touches on a 35-14 win over Houston with less than three minutes remaining in the fourth quarter of the game between the Broncos and Raiders, sealing a playoff spot for Tennessee and officially eliminating Oakland.
Carr said seeing the result had no impact on the way the rest of the game played out.
“I can’t worry about the Titans or all these other things,” he said. “I have to just do my job.”
The Raiders needed a win and losses by Tennessee, Pittsburgh and Jacksonville. They also needed to clinch the strength of victory tiebreaker, which they did earlier Sunday afternoon with Chicago’s last-minute win over Minnesota.
The Ravens defeated the Steelers, but the Jaguars rolled to a win over Indianapolis.
Coach Jon Gruden insisted he wasn’t aware of any of those developments until after his game concluded.
Tight end Darren Waller was more realistic.
“We’re human beings,” he said. “Of course we would peek up. They didn’t show it too often because I feel like because we had playoff implications they didn’t want us to know or whatever. But when they put up that Tennessee was up by three touchdowns, it was like, ‘Oh well, let’s just go play to win.’”
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Contact Adam Hill at ahill@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AdamHillLVRJ on Twitter.