The Oakland Raiders emerged victorious from an ugly Monday Night Football showdown against the Denver Broncos with a nice 23-20 victory in hand, and now they'll get ready for Week 2 against the Buffalo Bills. The problem is that the Raiders will have little time to prepare for Sunday's game, having played late into Monday night after a 10:15 ET start time. The other problem is that the Raiders will have to travel cross-country to Buffalo on the already depleted amount of time that they do have.
Add it all up and the Raiders will be some 40 hours behind the Bills by the time Sunday's game kicks off, according to Tim Kawakami. That's over a day-and-a-half of valuable time which any team would rather use to rest up, watch game tape and practice drills.
Of course, the Raiders don't have much of a choice. The team didn't do itself any favors on Monday night by committing 15 penalties and delaying the game's scheduled finish time by quite a bit. They'll have to be on the field and ready to play by Sunday's 1:00 start time, regardless of the time discrepancy.
West Coast teams in general tend to struggle when they travel to the East Coast on a shortened week, and the Raiders could face a big challenge against a Bills offense that put up 41 points against the Kansas City Chiefs in Week 1. Let's hope that the Raiders are on top of their game. Otherwise we may find ourselves asking whether the Bills will score more points in-game than they had extra hours of time pre-game.