Bee staff writer Jason Jones is at Raiders headquarters as the team prepares for the upcoming season. Read his blogs throughout the day at www.sacbee.com/ raidersblog. Here's an excerpt from Thursday's blog.
Today was the final day of scout-team work before Saturday night's exhibition game. As a result, there were plenty of false starts by the scout-team offense and a few turnovers. Kirk Morrison, Michael Huff and Ricky Brown had interceptions.
• There were three dropped passes in seven-on-seven by the offense. Drew Carter, Zach Miller and Johnnie Lee Higgins were the offenders.
• The usual list of injured Raiders this week (K Sebastian Janikowski, P Shane Lechler, CB John Bowie, LB Grant Irons, S Hiram Eugene, WR Arman Shields) will not play Saturday against Arizona.
WR Drisan James missed practice because he was ill.
• Kiffin said the plan on offense is to throw the ball this weekend. Defensively, Kiffin will try to make life difficult for Arizona QB Matt Leinart, who played under Kiffin at USC.
"Yeah, we're going to go old-school Buddy Ryan, as they call it around here," Kiffin said. "And we'll come after him every snap and put a bounty in the locker room on him."
That's a joke, people.
• S Tyvon Branch was left shaking his hand after hitting the football with his cast. Branch doesn't know how long he'll have to wear the cast.
But Kiffin obviously wants it off.
"It's still something really hard to do, to be able to tackle with that," Kiffin said. "What I miss the most is I know he can tackle, (but) I wish he was back there returning kickoffs for us, and getting through rookie mistakes."
Higgins will continue returning kickoffs in place of Branch. Kiffin just hopes Higgins holds on to the ball.
• I love the coaching style of James Lofton. Even when the wide receivers are simply running routes for the scout team, he's on them about running the proper route and technique.
