Raiders HC Josh McDaniels reveals upcoming plans before playing Rams

Justin Churchill — College Football & NFL Trending News Writer

Aug 15, 2023 6:15 PM EDT

The Las Vegas Raiders are now 5-0 in preseason play under head coach Josh McDaniels. We saw some great things, including Aidan O'Connell engineering the offense almost perfectly and the defense flying around, creating turnovers.

It's on to the Los Angeles Rams, where the Raiders will be a part of a joint practice later in the week. The team already flew out to L.A. shortly after their win.

"The thought process with the logistics here relative to the mandatory day off and those types of things — we can't travel on a mandatory day off," McDaniels said to the media in a virtual press conference Monday. "So, we didn't want to — we just thought this was the best thing logistically for us, is to go ahead and travel after the game, and that way, we can have our feet on the ground here and not try to do too much the day before we're getting ready to practice with another football team.

"Meaning, if we take the day off at home Monday and then try to go over the San Francisco stuff Tuesday at our place, hurry up and kind of cram in something for L.A., and then travel in the same day, and then, get up and go practice with them, we just didn't feel like that was conducive to giving ourselves the best opportunity to have a productive day. So, we thought this was best."

The Las Vegas Raiders will have their hands full with the Rams. This isn't the same team that lost a ton of games in 2022. They might not be at the championship level they were in 2021, but they still have superstars everywhere on the roster

This team still has one of the best wide receivers in the league in Cooper Kupp, even if he may not play, the best defensive tackle and maybe the best defensive player in the league in Aaron Donald, and an experienced quarterback in Matthew Stafford. All of these guys missed time last year and were injured in some capacity.

This week will only help the Raiders.

"Now, we're trying to fine-tune some of the details to improve, depending on the phase we're talking about in our game. And so, there's a lot of things we saw last night and this morning on the film that we know we can do better, and we're going to need to do better as we go forward. So, we'll be hard at work tomorrow discussing that with our team, and then hopefully, we can make some progress here in L.A."

The Raiders will play the Rams on Sunday, and we still aren't quite sure who will play, and how much those players will play