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The decision to cut Johnathan Abram left the Las vegas Raiders with a hole at safety. Duron Harmon and Tre’von Moehrig are likely to remain the starters but the team certainly needs depth. Instead of looking for outside help, the Raiders have decided to give a young player a shot.
Head coach Josh McDaniels revealed that undrafted rookie safety Isaiah Pola-Mao will be elevated from the practice squad to the active roster.
The former USC standout has suited up in two games for the Raiders this season but only took snaps on special teams. That will likely remain the case in the coming weeks but there’s a chance he’ll be asked to play some defensive snaps. Las Vegas must like what they’ve seen in practice if they’re willing to give him a shot without seeing him play defense in games. Pola-Mao is massive for a safety at 6-foot-4 and has really good speed. Notably, he’s the nephew of Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Famer Troy Polamalu, who also played at USC. If Pola-Mao could even be half the player his uncle was, the Raiders have found a serious steal. With Abram now with the Green Bay Packers, he’ll have a real shot to play meaningful snaps in the coming weeks.
Raiders Hoping to Bring Smarter Defenders
It’s safe to say that things haven’t gone according to plan for the Raiders’ defense this season. Defensive coordinator Patrick Graham is a respected mind in the NFL but his group hasn’t gotten any better. However, he didn’t have a ton to work with when he joined the team. The Raiders have not invested heavily in defense in recent years and when they have, it’s mostly failed. Graham likes to run a complex system but he needs the right players to run it properly. According to Vincent Bonsignore of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Raiders are going to look for specific types of players in the offseason.
“There is a prototype that they are looking for. They want to bring in higher IQ players that can carry out what Patrick Graham is trying to do,” Bonsignore said on 920 Raider Nation Radio’s “Unnecessary Roughness,” via Raiders Beat. “Between now and next offseason I would say expect a lot of changes defensively.”
“I think that’s definitely something that is going on, and when I say IQ, I mean football IQ,” Bonsignore continued. “In talking to people here, I think one of the things they really want to stress is having a team that can execute at the highest level and sometimes that means taking it up a notch from the game-planning perspective.”
Graham Talks Complexity of Defense
If the Raiders don’t start winning games, Graham is going to start feeling the heat. The team had more success with Gus Bradley’s simple zone defense last season. He understands that it’s important not to make a defense too complicated.
“There’s always a fine line of whether you want to make it – you don’t want to make it too complicated where guys are out there thinking too much,” Graham said Tuesday. “And you don’t want to make it too simple because this league is tough. You see teams, they adjust during the game and adjust from week to week. So, you definitely got to make sure that you’re changing it up. You got to find the balance between the two, but that’s definitely something that goes into every game plan each week, whether it’s us or somebody else. But I think Josh [McDaniels] talked about it earlier in this process, just this game is about adjustments. So, that’s a big part of it.”
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