SARASOTA, Fla. — Late Wednesday morning, as the Raiders held a relaxed walk-through on the grounds of their team hotel in Sarasota, a few people stood watching from sunlit balconies of an adjacent hotel, some 20 floors up, intrigued by the sight of a large group of men moving in deliberate synchronicity across the top of a parking garage.
The air was calm and clear, and it was impossible to tell if the onlookers, from that height and distance, fully discerned what they were watching: an embattled NFL team, lately a darling of prognosticators, facing by any measure a crossroads of its 2017 season.