ALAMEDA — His injury has lingered longer than anyone originally expected, but Raiders coach Jack Del Rio said that he still expects defensive end Mario Edwards Jr. to return this season.

“Yeah, I do,” Del Rio said Monday at his weekly news conference, “but until he gets cleared, it’s just kind of wait and see.”

Edwards injured his hip in the opening exhibition game on Aug. 12 in Arizona and initial reports had him expected to miss about six weeks. That eventually got stretched out when he opened the season on injured reserve with the expectation he would eventually be designated to return. That guaranteed he would miss at least the first eight games but the Raiders thought at the time they were taking an extra cautious approach.

“The best thing for him is to be completely healed when we get him back,” Del Rio said in September when Edwards went on IR. “There’s a chance that a month and a half from now he’s going to be saying, ‘Hey, I’m ready to go.’ There might be a game or two that he might have been ready, but it was the decision we felt was sound.”

Edwards became eligible to start practicing on Oct. 18 and Del Rio said that week that he expected him to start running on the side at practice, something that’s still yet to happen. He’s been eligible to play as of the Nov. 6 game against Denver.

The Raiders must officially designate him to return before he can practice and there’s no timeline of practices that he’s required to participate in before he can play, although Edwards would obviously need to work himself back into game shape with him now 3 1/2 months removed from playing.

— The Raiders are hopeful to get cornerback David Amerson back this week as Del Rio indicated the team took the cautious approach by having him miss Sunday’s game with a knee injury.

“We were hoping he would be able to go,” Del Rio said of Amerson. “There was a question there and we just elected to give him a little more rest and hopefully get him back this week.”

— DJ Hayden, the Raiders’ slot cornerback who started in Amerson’s place, left the game with a hamstring injury and didn’t return. Del Rio did not offer an update on him.

“I’m not going to speculate on it,” Del Rio said.