Becoming confused by the lowly Steelers and Kenny Pickett in Sunday Night Football finally broke the spell Derek Carr had on the Raiders. On Wednesday, Raiders head coach Josh McDaniels decided to sit on the bench Raiders’ starting midfielder for the past nine years for the final two weeks of the regular season. Jarrett Stidham’s promotion was temporary, but Carr’s demotion was no attempt to keep Carr fresh for 2023. Derek Carr’s Black and Silver Raider days are numbered.
Carr’s $40.4 million injury guarantee will be fully refunded if he fails to pass his physical by the third day of the 2023 waiver period, giving the Raiders a clear motivation to remove his salary from their books. The fact that Mark Davis is one of the poorest owners in the NFL further encourages the Raiders to look elsewhere for their dream quarterback. Maybe it becomes Trey Lance, Jimmy Garoppolo or Tom Brady. Carr being the Raiders’ high-paid quarterback for a decade was the pinnacle of procrastination.
Early in his career, he was clearly not a franchised quarterback, but a career year 2016 gave him more time to prove himself. In a tournament where the franchise quarterbacks were expected to compete in the Super Bowls, Carr’s ceiling was the Wild Card Round and he kept bumping his head against that low bar.
As early as 2018, when the underutilized Amari Cooper was transferred to Dallas in the middle of the season, faith in Carr began to dry up. Reportedly, Dana White tried to reach an agreement that there will be Brady under the center for the 2020 pre-season raid, Derek Carr has since insisted he’s not the jerk Brady referred to on HBO’s Shopand now he is no longer the starting midfielder of Raid.
For the past four seasons, Carr has kept his head just above sea level, but the franchise’s desperate glasses have prevented them from seeing the truth. Throughout Vegas’s 2021 season, Carr was an excellent deep passer, but at the expense of being a revolving machine.
Last January, Carr’s red zone interception during their Wild Card match against the Bengals brought their tumultuous 2021 campaign to a halt. After the Raiders brought Carr’s favorite State of Fresno target Davante Adams to Vegas, reality just started to freeze. At the same time, Carr was awarded a three-year, $121.5 million contract extension and the expectation was that he and Adams would form one of the league’s most dynamic duos.
After what I saw in Week 1, I’m ready to bet in Carre. He was constantly knocking down receivers at the bottom, making countless mistakes and never showing the commanding prowess of a supposedly purposeful quarterback. The Raiders don’t seem to realize the AFC West is a Patrick Mahomes-Justin Herbert monopoly, and that Carr is closer to Russell Wilson’s basement than the other two gilded signal callers in his department. Carr is a midfield midfielder who requires ideal conditions to develop, otherwise he can perform like an average student, playing up or down at his opponent’s level, but could not elevate his co-stars to the elite level.
Low expectations in the past have protected Carr from excessive scrutiny, but the 2022 furnace is instructive. Carr is in his final days with the Raiders. Good freedom to bad garbage.
