After the season ended for the Oakland Raiders, I tried to look at the bright optimistic side of things. I mean, according to almost every sports magazine I saw, the Raiders weren’t even supposed to be in a place to win the division. Did they stumble at the end? Yes. Though when you look at what happened, it seemed as though they were probably running on fumes, and fumes will only take you so far. I want to take a look at the interesting case of Michael Bush.

First let’s look at what Bush did this season. Michael Bush took on a huge load and was worked harder than almost any back in the league. You may look at the stats and see that he had the normal amount of carries for a starting running back, but what the stats don’t always show is that he may not have carried the ball an extreme amount of times every game, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t in the play blocking or running a route. It got so bad that Rock Cartwright had to spell Bush on a few plays a game. No offense to Cartwright, but he just isn’t the type of running back that you want to use in normal game situations. He is a special teams player and he is good at it. I love him for what he does, but if he’s in the offense then either something went wrong, or they’re running some kind of special trick play. As the season went on, Bush could not do what he had shown flashes of in games throughout his career, such as the first San Diego game. Why? Well, I think he got worn down, teams started game planning for him, and he isn’t a dynamic runner. Now, I like Bush, but from what I saw this season, my perception of him has changed. I used to think that he could be a legitimate starter in the NFL. Now that I got to see more of him, I think he is better suited to be apart of a two-back system. I think he could have a chance at 1,000 yards consistently, but I think the NFL will catch up with him and they will figure out what some defenses already figured out; he can’t really run outside of the tackles. This past season it was clearly visible how much the Raiders missed McFadden and even Taiwan Jones. Oakland would try to run sweeps and Bush could not get the edge. This put the Raiders run game into a bit of predictability. After the first San Diego game, fans adored Bush and it looked like the Raiders would be okay with McFadden out. There were some people who were still critical in saying that McFadden would’ve took some of Bush’s runs for touchdowns. Though this may be true, I was happy with Bush. No, he isn’t McFadden, but he is a different kind of runner. Yes, he may not break off long touchdown runs like McFadden, but what he does do is wear down a defense. By not scoring a touchdown right away, Bush forces defenses to stay on the field, tires out the defense, and he keeps the opposing offense off the field.

You may say, look at Bush’s stats and how close he came to 1,000 yards as a back-up. Yes, he did get close to 1,000 yards, but that was a very quiet close. The Raiders were built this season as a run-first offense. The run game was supposed to be a focal point of the offense and one of the reasons that Palmer would be successful. You could see in almost every game that Bush started in, the Raiders attempted to establish the run game early. In more than one game, the defense was ready for it, and quickly took away the run. Defenses stuffed the inside running lanes because they didn’t have to really worry about Bush taking off to the outside. So, what we ended up seeing was the Raiders get down in the game and then try to play catch-up. That’s when they got more predictable; understandably, you don’t want to run the clock out on yourself. This is where Bush’s stats were somewhat deceiving. He would often get his yards off of draw plays and plays where he wasn’t exactly expected to run. For example, Oakland would often play conservative on third and long, and throw a short pass or run a draw. If it was third and twenty, a draw play may be called for Bush in which he would pick up about fifteen yards. Do that a few times a game, and add in some of his regular carries, and it will look like he had a pretty good game. He wasn’t breaking off fifteen or ten yard runs at the beginning of the game to set the tone early. He was breaking off those runs when Oakland was getting “garbage yards.”

I initially thought that the Raiders would be okay for a few weeks until McFadden came back. McFadden was only supposed to be out for a few weeks. As we now know, McFadden never made it back. So what I feel Oakland should do with Michael Bush is let him go. Don’t pay too much for bush when you don’t have to and you could use that money somewhere with more need. The running back market is low, so let him test free agency and let him see how much of a struggle it is for him to get a descent contract offer. This past season we saw that the value of running backs has decreased. If you aren’t a real game-changing running back like Adrian Peterson or Chris Johnson, then you were left either without a contract or with one that was much lower than expected. Don’t put the franchise tag on Bush. Get him cheap. Let him test the market and see that there’s nothing there. At worst, maybe Oakland can bring over a similar type of back. Maybe even Brandon Jacobs.

Alex Lara is an NFL team writer for TPF and can be contacted at ALara@ThePenaltyFlagBlog.com

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