Oakland Raiders coach Dennis Allen said that Terrelle Pryor will start the team's regular-season finale against the Denver Broncos on Sunday, but Pryor's agent believes that the team is setting his client up to fail in order to simplify their quarterback situation with an emerging Matt McGloin pushing for Pryor's job.
"I think they're putting him in hopes that he fails," Jerome Stanley told CSNBayArea.com. "That's what I think coach is doing. I think they're putting him in hopes that he has a bad game, so he can then justify the Matt McGloin situation. I think that's what's going on, I do and it's ridiculous."
Pryor started eight of the Raiders first nine games after beating out Matt Flynn for the job in training camp, but McGloin took over on Nov. 10 after Pryor suffered an MCL sprain in his right knee.
McGloin, who was a fourth-stringer out of training camp, has started the past six games and even stayed in under center after Pryor returned. McGloin went undrafted out of Penn State and won his first start Nov. 17 against the Houston Texans, but has not notched a win since.
The Raiders are 4-11 entering Sunday, and a loss would drop Allen to 8-24 in two seasons. According to ESPN, Stanley believes that Allen is going back to Pryor in order to justify his moves to start McGloin in a last-ditch effort to save his job.
"You have to understand the coach is putting him in, he doesn't want him to look good. And you can write that. He doesn't want him to look good because, if he looks good this week, it makes the past five weeks look like a bad decision. [Allen] doesn't want him to look good, he wants him to look bad. That is what is going on," Stanley told CSNBayArea.com.
Allen had insisted earlier Monday that McGloin hasn't fallen out of favor and that wasn't the reason why he opted to go with Pryor.
"Absolutely not," Allen told ESPN about his reasons for benching McGloin. "We want to get another opportunity to see, and we've said for a while now that we want to be able to evaluate Terrelle, so here's an opportunity to go in and do that. Listen, when Terrelle's played, he's gone in and done a good job. So we anticipate he'll go in and play well."
This season, Pryor is 135-for-234 (57.7%) for 1,591 yards with five touchdowns and 11 interceptions through 10 starts while McGloin is 118-for-211 (55.9%) for 1,547 yards with eight scores and eight picks in seven games.
"We got a chance to see Matt McGloin for six games. I liked a lot of things that I saw in Matt," Allen told ESPN. It's been a while since we've gotten an opportunity to see Terrelle in a game, and I want to get him in the game and get another opportunity to evaluate him."
ESPN reports that Stanley believes that the team should have inserted Pryor for evaluation following the Raiders Thanksgiving Day loss to the Dallas Cowboys.
Stanley said that he believed that Pryor could be a successful starting quarterback in the league.
"I expect that. I'll be shocked if it didn't happen," he told CSNBayArea.com.
He has his chance to prove that on Sunday, whether or not he's set up to fail.
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