Raiders snap four-game skid 38-33 at Jets, Jeanty down to two carries

The Raiders came home from New Jersey with something they had not held since September: a win. Las Vegas beat the Jets 38-33 on Sunday, erasing a nine-point second-half deficit to snap a four-game losing streak and hit the halfway mark at 4-4, with the Jets falling to 2-6, as KTNV reported.

Kirk Cousins ran the offense like a man who had read last week's mail. He went 19 of 26 for 247 yards and three touchdowns, added a 1-yard sneak for his first rushing score of the year, and completed a season-high 73.1 percent of his throws, the first Raiders quarterback with multiple passing touchdowns and a rushing touchdown in the same game since Derek Carr in 2020, per the team. Las Vegas went 4-for-4 in the red zone for 28 points and 7-for-11 on third down, which in a game this loose is the whole margin.

Brock Bowers caught seven passes for 92 yards and two touchdowns, his first multi-score game since last December, and passed Mike Ditka for the most receiving yards by a non-receiver through 35 career games. Dylan Laube took a kickoff 95 yards to the house, the league's first kick return touchdown this season and the Raiders' first since 2011.

The line item that will draw the most attention is Ashton Jeanty's. He got two carries for nine yards, five touches in all, a career low, while rookie Mike Washington Jr. started and ran 25 times for 83 yards on a career-high 38 snaps, as ESPN reported. Klint Kubiak said the split was his doing and unrelated to Jeanty saying last week that some Jets defenders "don't really want to tackle." "That's my call," Kubiak said, per CBS Sports, adding that Jeanty is "still going to be a big part of our team." Jeanty produced the day's biggest play anyway, a 45-yard catch and run that set up Jalen Nailor's go-ahead touchdown.

The defense earned none of this before halftime, when the Jets outgained Las Vegas 140-27 on the ground and scored on all five possessions. After the break it held New York to 26 rushing yards, Maxx Crosby logged a sack and two hits on Geno Smith, and Jeremy Chinn picked off Smith in the end zone in the closing seconds for the defense's 13th takeaway, according to Raiders.com.

Opinion, labeled as such: a win assembled from a kick return, a 3.3-yard-per-carry rookie and a last-second interception is a stay of execution, not a turned corner. "It wasn't all pretty, but it's not always going to be pretty," Kubiak said. Next Sunday at San Francisco prices that properly. Watch whether Washington keeps the early-down work once the staff has seen the film.