Oakland Raiders

This morning, the Oakland Raiders embarked on their first practice of the fifth day of training camp, marking their penultimate 'learning practice' with the pads being broken out tomorrow, and the contact beginning.

Today's practice once again focused on getting the little things right, so that the mistakes will be out of the way by the time the pads come on tomorrow. Here is a look at Cable's assessment of the work today:

On what he has seen of Mike Mitchell's progress:

[Mitchell is] guy that's getting lined up right, making the right calls, really not too much again until we get rolling tomorrow.

On Mitchell and the competition at safety:

Competition starts tomorrow. It's on. And everyone's got to fight for a job to get this thing down to 53 and the right 53 and inside of that obviously who your starters are and so forth. So I expect him to push everyone and anyone who's at his position.

Cable sees the team making progress needed to get ready for the contact to begin tomorrow:

Yeah I think we're in the routine like we need to be. I think we're getting kind of settled as far as the learning phase. We've got all the stuff taught now so from that standpoint, pleased, but we'll start over and really have something to gauge it on once we add the physical part of it.

On striking a balance once the contact begings:

Just that point you're making right there and we'll talk about it tonight as a team. Just take care of our own. We want to light it up and have the purpose, the right kind of purpose behind it. The most important thing is to stress these are your teammates.

Once the pads go on, the tempo will pick up:

You'll see us have a different tempo. In other words, I've kind of let the periods run over if we needed to clear something up. We won't have to do with the tempo that we go at. The most important thing is speed of play when the ball is snapped. That will be dramatically different.

The concept of these practices are to eliminate the small things that have stopped the Raiders from winning the close games:

That’s the whole, knock on wood, you’ve only seen three balls on the ground from center-quarterback exchange. We’ve only had real busts, think we’re about four a day right now. We’ve repeated a number of things, but just to get more detail to it, but it’s all because of that, we want to clean it up, we’re not going to win until we become very efficient, and that’s discipline and knowing exactly how and what they’re asking me to do as a player.