Skid Points to Weakness of Raiders : Pro football: The offensive line, thought to be a strength, has been overmatched, hurting the passing attack.

Four games, four defeats. Can it get any worse for the Raiders?

With their 27-7 loss to Kansas City on Monday night, the Raiders’ overall losing streak stretched to eight games--with no immediate relief in sight.

The Raiders will play the New York Giants at the Coliseum on Sunday, then play Buffalo, Dallas, Philadelphia, Miami, Washington, Denver and Kansas City again. Those teams have a combined record of 21-3.

“What we need is to get a win,” Coach Art Shell said Tuesday. “We need a win real bad. Winning will solve a lot of problems.”

Problems, though, are what the Raiders have plenty of.

No team has ever won an NFL championship after starting the season 0-4. The last time the Raiders opened the season so badly was in 1964, when they had an 0-5-1 start under Coach Al Davis and finished 5-7-2.

Despite their dismal start, Shell is not ready to scuttle the season in favor of a youth movement.

“We’ve always added youth to the team and brought them into the system slowly,” Shell said. “There’s no thought of a (youth movement), because we feel that the people we have will come around. They’ll have to come around.”

A lingering question, though, is whether the players they have in the lineup are still talented enough to win.

The offensive line, which seemed to be one of the team’s strengths at the start of the season, was overmatched at Kansas City. The Raiders rushed for 90 yards, but if Eric Dickerson’s 40-yard touchdown run is taken away, the team averaged only 2.3 yards per carry.

“We didn’t run the ball as well as we would have liked,” Shell said. “We had a couple of opportunities to break off long runs, but we didn’t get it done. We need to make the plays when we have a chance to do so.”

Without a consistent running game, quarterback Todd Marinovich had problems getting time to find open receivers. Kansas City’s Neil Smith and Derrick Thomas pressured him all night and Marinovich completed only 12 of his 26 passes, throwing two interceptions.

“If we ran the ball better, we would not have been in so many tough-pass situations,” Shell said. “We tried to keep people in to help on the corners and stop their rush, but then we couldn’t get everyone out on patterns.”

The Raider receivers also had trouble getting open and catching the ball. Too often, Marinovich threw to receivers who were blanketed by defenders.

And there are injuries. Wide receiver Tim Brown still is hampered by a hamstring injury--he was not activated for the Kansas City game--and his replacement, Sam Graddy, is probably sidelined for the season because of a broken arm suffered during the fourth quarter against the Chiefs.

Injuries have hurt the offensive line, too. Tackle Steve Wright suffered a shoulder injury Monday night and was replaced by Reggie McElroy. The line, which already was playing with Todd Peat in place of injured veteran standout Max Montoya, struggled afterward.

On defense, the Raiders have developed a knack for finding a way to let the opposition win.

In the opening-season loss to Denver, the Raiders gave up a key fourth-quarter completion by John Elway. Against Cincinnati, the defense could not stop the Bengals’ rushing attack. And against Cleveland, it couldn’t stop Eric Metcalf.

Against Kansas City, it was more of the same as the Chiefs ran against the Raiders’ with power backs Barry Word and Christian Akoye, who combined for 155 yards in 35 carries.

“We didn’t stop the run, and that hurt us,” Shell said. “Sometimes we were caught in the wrong defense, but the big problem was that we had people flow so fast that cutbacks hurt us. When you cut back a lot, you get a lot of arm tackles that their big backs ran through.”

Whatever the combination, the Raiders have found a way to lose every week.

“It’s mind-boggling,” Shell said of the Raiders’ second-half collapse against Kansas City. “We get ready and go out there and play hard for a quarter, but then we stop. I can’t explain why we didn’t have the same intensity for the entire game.”