OAKLAND, Calif. - There are happier rooms in the waiting area at the IRS audit department than there were in the visitors' locker room at the Oakland-Alameda County Stadium yesterday afternoon.

Players for the Eagles sat at their stalls, still dressed, hunched over, not even bothering to begin unwinding the athletic tape on their socks. Offensive-line coach Juan Castillo slumped into a chair and stared off, seeing nothing, still clutching a crumpled sheet of game notes.

Down a side corridor, owner Jeffrey Lurie conferred quietly with a trainer and team president Joe Banner leaned against a wall, his face as set as the concrete at his back.

Suddenly, maybe it wasn't such a bad thing that the Phillies are still playing and stealing the attention from the Eagles.

Not paying attention to the Eagles yesterday was a pretty good idea. They came out flat against a very bad football team and lost, 13-9, to the Oakland Raiders.

With the exception of one big play, an 86-yard catch and run for a touchdown by tight end Zach Miller in the first quarter, the Raiders didn't do anything special to earn the win - at least offensively.

The Eagles, however, were unable to get out of their own way all afternoon. They stunk the place up and knew it. That accounted for the somber locker room. Every player in it knew that truly great football teams don't lose these games. If this one could be a struggle, anything can happen this season.

"I'm embarrassed with the way we played," quarterback Donovan McNabb said. "We're a much better football team. With a young team, you take baby steps and sometimes you hit a wall. We didn't expect it, but we hit the wall today."

Perhaps that was part of it. They didn't expect it because the Raiders have been awful this season, having lost to the New York Giants by 37 points the previous week. The lesson of the NFL's great cliché - any given Sunday - is that any team will rise up and take a Sunday if you give it one. That's what the Eagles did yesterday.

If there is an asterisk to be stuck on the stat sheet of this one, it involves the sad state of the offensive line, which for most of yesterday's game was operating without four-fifths of the projected starters for this season.

When Jason Peters went down with a knee injury in the first quarter, and with the team apparently unwilling to put Stacy Andrews on the field very much, the Eagles were lining up, left to right, with King Dunlap, Nick Cole, Jamaal Jackson, Max Jean-Gilles, and Winston Justice. In a major surprise, they could neither open holes for the running backs nor protect the quarterback.

McNabb was sacked six times and harried all afternoon, and bristled a bit when someone suggested he should have been getting rid of the ball more quickly.

"It's hard to get the ball out when you've got guys on you," he said.

Aside from the offensive- line situation - which should be sounding all the alarms in the little green bunker at the corner of Broad and Pattison - there were plenty of other problems on display.

For one thing, on a day when it might have made sense to have Mike Vick come in and run some of the spread-option package, he didn't take a single snap. He was on the field twice, both times in the first half, taking a handoff for a 4-yard loss on one play and being a decoy on the other.

Why spend all the time and effort you have on that garbage if you aren't going to use it on a day when traditional pocket passing is ill-advised and when nothing much is going right?

There was plenty more, too, all the little nagging things that sometimes come together - very much as they did in that late-season flop against Washington in 2008.

The Eagles wasted time- outs, looked disorganized in spots, passed on nearly every down, and weren't opportunistic when they had chances.

In the first half, the Eagles had four drives in which they had first downs at the Oakland 35-yard line or better. (Actually, the 29, 35, 27, and 15). They got a grand total of six points from those. In the second half, two more drives got them first downs inside the 30, and they got just three points from those. Awful.

To the list of potential problems, you can add the question of whether David Akers - who missed two field goals - is still reliable in the long term. You can wonder why signing Jeremiah Trotter was such a good idea after watching him get beaten badly on a touchdown play. You can certainly wonder if Asante Samuel is ever going to make a tackle, or if he's too busy drawing stupid penalties.

It all came together, it all came apart, and it ended with a bounced fourth-down pass to DeSean Jackson - a perfectly fitting end to the Eagles' day.

It was better to just get off that field, hang their heads in the locker room for a while, and then talk bravely about how it's a long season and, well, these things happen.

"All great teams go through adversity," Peters said.

Of course, so do the mediocre ones and the bad ones. On a given Sunday, you can't tell any of them apart.

Contact columnist Bob Ford at 215-854-5842 or bford@phillynews.com. Read his blog at http://philly.com/postpatterns.