Raiders Might Have Been 5-0, but They Are 4-1 : Pro football: With the Seahawks ahead, there is little time for reflecting on blowing a lead in Buffalo.

The Raiders took 6 minutes 3 seconds Monday, the time it took Buffalo to score 24 fourth-quarter points a day earlier, to reflect on what might have been at 5-0. That’s about all the time Coach Art Shell would allocate for Monday mourning after a 38-24 loss to the Bills.

“You can’t dwell on it,” Shell said. “It got away from us. We should have won the game. We didn’t. We’ll watch (the film) today as a team, and then we’ll put it away and get started concentrating on Seattle. . . . I think right now our team is more mature and can handle the situation better than they did in the past couple of years.”

You have to be mature to handle what happened Sunday in Orchard Park, N.Y., when a 24-14 Raider lead disappeared in minutes. You have to be mature to handle another team outscoring yours, 24-7, in crunch time.

“Twenty-four points is too much to give to anybody,” Shell said. “It’s too much to give to a high school team.”

Before moving on, a few loose ends to tie up. The turning point? It wasn’t Steve Tasker’s blocked punt that led to a 38-yard touchdown return and Buffalo’s first lead of the game with 6:52 left. It wasn’t linebacker Cornelius Bennett’s strip search of quarterback Jay Schroeder, in which Bennett sacked Schroeder, knocked the ball loose and recovered it, leading to a 23-yard field goal and a 31-24 lead.

Shell said the turning point came on the ensuing drive, when corner Nate Odomes stole the ball from Willie Gault after a reception at midfield and returned it 49 yards for the final touchdown with 2:34 left.

“I felt we were ready to go right back down there and score,” Shell said. “I felt we were in control of the game. We let them have control at that point.”

Shell also said the films revealed that Gault was out of bounds when Odomes snatched the ball from his hands.

“If that’s the case, then the ball should have been ours going the other way,” he said. “The officials didn’t see it that way, so we have to live with it; not that we like it, but we have to live with it.”

A few other inquiries before the Raiders move on to Seattle:

What happened to the Raiders’ pass rush? It led the league with 17 sacks going into the game, but remained stuck on 17 when it ended. Rookie linebacker Aaron Wallace, who had four sacks in two previous weeks, was nowhere to be found.

What happened to the Raiders’ special teams? Solid as rock the first four weeks, the unit cracked against the Bills. Tim Brown fumbled a punt in the first half that led to a touchdown. A blocked punt in the fourth quarter turned into the go-ahead score. Shell said the Raiders didn’t have a player assigned to Tasker, a special teams star, who ran untouched into Jeff Gossett’s foot. Shell said he was free by design, and that Tasker just got a great jump off the snap.

Sunday’s news wasn’t all bad, though. Schroeder turned in another solid performance at quarterback, completing 17 of 29 passes for 244 yards and two touchdowns. His one interception came late on a desperate throw into heavy traffic. Schroeder entered the game as the AFC’s second-rated passer, about eight or nine notches higher than some figured he would be at this point.

“Jay did an outstanding job,” Shell said. “He threw the ball well.”

For the second consecutive week against a formidable front, the Raider offensive line protected Schroeder well enough. Sunday, he had plenty of time until Buffalo’s fourth-quarter adrenaline boost helped the pass rush break through the protection.

“The line protected him really well early in the game,” Shell said. “They gave up two sacks, and a couple of times they were nibbling at him, but he stood in the pocket and threw the ball. The line, they shut down a pretty good defensive front for most of the game.”

Leading the way again was left tackle Rory Graves, who in successive weeks has held Chicago’s Richard Dent and Buffalo’s Bruce Smith to nine tackles and no sacks.

So, other than a painful six minutes, Shell had no real gripes.

“That’s a good football team we’ve got here,” he said. “We played hard, under adverse conditions again, with 80,000 people screaming and hollering. And we had control of the game. We just didn’t put it away. Next time in that situation, I think we’ll put it away.”