Raiders Top Cornerback Got Torched By Two Jets Receivers

Usually, it’s not a bad idea to put your top cornerback on an island against the other team’s best receiver. That’s why top cornerbacks get paid, and the best of the best have the ability to get it done. 

But that’s not what happened yesterday against the New York Jets. The Las Vegas Raiders got a horrendously bad first half from cornerback Eric Stokes, and it almost cost them a winnable game. 

Stokes is usually reliable, which made what happened on Sunday especially shocking. The Raiders put Stokes on malcontent Jets wide receiver Garrett Wilson, and the results were beyond bad. 

The Jets made a concerted effort to get Wilson involved after he went off on passing game coordinator Seth Ryan during their loss to the Miami Dolphins in Week 7, thinking it should be a relatively easy job to either shut down Wilson or at least slow him up. 

Instead the opposite happened. Wilson caught pass after pass from quarterback Geno Smith, who may have seen or known something about Stokes to initiate this strategy from their time together as teammates last year. 

These weren’t ordinary NFL throwing windows, either. Stokes was often caught running well behind Wilson, and once the Jets found something that was workingl they stuck with it. Smith connected with Wilson for 31 yards on the Jets first drive, then again on New York’s second drive, with both drives producing field goals. 

Then receiver Adonai Mitchell got involved, and things go worse. Stokes got burned again for a 20-yard completion, and Mitchell got another 22 yards against rookie cornerback Jermod McCoy. By the time the first half was over, Smith had a 147 yards passing, most of them on simple pitch-and-catch throws, and the Jets had a 23-14 lead. 

This didn’t last, thankfully. The Raiders got their offense cranked up and came back to win the game, and Las Vegas switched some assignments to give Stokes some help. It’s something of a mystery why it took so long to do this, and it will be interesting to see what defensive coordinator Rob Leonard has to say about all this during his mid-week media availability. 

Was this simply a bad game, or something Smith knew about that allowed him to exploit Stokes’ vulnerability? That will likely be the assumption going forward given how reliable Stokes has been, but it simply can’t happen going forward. The Raiders defense is now trending toward historically bad, and Stokes was a big part of the problem against the Jets.