Derek Carr Is About to Kick Off This Offseason’s Quarterback Carousel
The 2022 season is over. And we’re wrapping up Super Bowl LVII still, with a look ahead too …
• At this point, there’s no reason for the Raiders not to just hang on to Derek Carr until 4 p.m. Tuesday, just in case someone panics and throws them a pick for him. And with Carr’s time in Vegas down to its final hours, it’s worth looking at where this has been, where it is and where it’s going from here.
One, the Raiders’ inability to deal Carr had nothing to do with trade terms—Vegas would’ve been happy to get anything for him. Really, it was about the contract. No one was willing to take on the contract and send the Raiders draft-pick compensation to do it.
Two, that tells you that the market for Carr will be below what’s currently on his contract, because if teams were willing to pay him, someone would have to come and get him.
Three, because of that, Carr joins Geno Smith as quarterbacks who could get new deals done before free agency, which would help to define the market for other pending free agents like Daniel Jones and Jimmy Garoppolo, ahead of a new league year that should see a good amount of quarterback movement.
Derek Carr has links to a number of teams with openings under center this offseason.
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• For what it’s worth, by all accounts, the Saints’ two-day visit with Carr went well. The quarterback has maintained a relationship with Dennis Allen, his first NFL coach, over the years, so I’d expect New Orleans to take another stab at Carr in free agency.
Another quarterback to watch in free agency for New Orleans would be Baker Mayfield. The Saints staff was high on Mayfield ahead of the 2018 draft, and those old draft evals can definitely have an impact down the road with guys as they get older and hit free agency, especially when there’s a need that can be tied to it.
• Meanwhile, the hiring of ex-Raiders and Titans OC Todd Downing in New York will, of course, have people connecting Carr to the Jets. Downing was with Carr for three years in Oakland, and was promoted from quarterbacks coach his final year there, in 2017, in part because of his close relationship with the quarterback. The next year, Mark Davis landed Jon Gruden, and Jack Del Rio’s whole staff was fired to accommodate the new coach. But the ties between Downing and Carr are still there.
That said, it’s hardly the only connection to draw here. Jets coach Robert Saleh was with Garoppolo in San Francisco for three-and-a-half seasons. New OC Nathaniel Hackett was with Aaron Rodgers in Green Bay for three years. Downing was also with Ryan Tannehill in Tennessee. So at the very least, the Jets are going to have damn good institutional knowledge on the group of quarterbacks that figure to be available.
• Chiefs QBs coach/senior offensive assistant Matt Nagy got to see Patrick Mahomes as a rookie, and now he’s got him again in Year 6. Which means he saw the raw talent coming out of Texas Tech, and a much more finished product a half-decade later when he returned to Andy Reid’s staff.
“He's much different,” Nagy said. “And that's all the credit to him and the guys that he's been with these last four or five years. But the beauty of Patrick is he prepared and played tonight's game from the beginning of two weeks ago till tonight, like he did every other game this whole entire year. It was not different and guys like him, in big moments, they make big plays. Some guys can't do that. But his whole career, he makes big plays in big moments. And when you have that, you win a lot.
“And he works hard and people just don't understand the commitment he makes, Monday through Saturday. They don't understand it—it's crazy. They see the touchdown passes, they see the toughness on the field, but he's mentally tough too, and we knew for a fact that he wasn't coming out of that game once he got hurt a little bit there. We knew that. It's just … He's a leader. He's a leader.”
• And part of being a leader, as we mentioned in the morning column, was prioritizing being with his teammates at halftime, which meant refusing treatment from the Kansas City training staff, led by VP of sports medicine and performance/longtime Reid confidant Rick Burkholder, in the locker room.
Mahomes could do it, Burkholder said, because of the level of trust established between the quarterback and those charged with treating his ankle.
“He buys into them and buys into me, so it's easy to do,” Burkholder said. “The three of us, and really [athletic trainer] Julie [Frymyer], have such a relationship with him that he knows what to do. I had to fight with him to get the X-ray originally, back in the Jacksonville game. But after the game he said 'Rick, man, I appreciate you, you did the right thing. I'm just competitive.'
“We're together all the time. I mean, Julie spent hours and hours with him and if we thought he was in danger, we would've pulled him. But he wasn't and we had that video on the sideline. And then he got up and was mobile …”
Which told them he was good in the moment, and was good to be left alone at the half.
“He's an angry dog when he gets hurt,” Burkholder continued. “But I trust Patrick because he trusts us, and we have unbelievable conversations about it and he's dead-honest with us and he'll tell us if he's hurting. He had a couple tweaks in practice, and I said 'Are you O.K.?’ And he said 'I'll be fine, just keep an eye on me.' That kind of thing.
“So it's an interesting thing with athletic trainers and athletes because it's different than the doctors. Because we're with them all the time, and you just saw how he hugged Julie. There's a relationship there that goes well beyond medicine.”
• One thing that shouldn’t go overlooked, and Reid mentioned it in my morning column—the job the Chiefs offensive line did against a fearsome Eagles front. Mahomes wasn’t sacked once (the Eagles had 70 sacks in 17 games this year). The Chiefs rushed for 158 yards (to the Eagles’ 115) at a 6.1-yard-per-carry clip (Philly averaged 3.6 yards). And that illustrates how one edge many thought Philly would have never materialized.
It's a triumph for Reid and line coach Andy Heck, and Brett Veach and his scouting department, too, in how they turned over a line that was old and pretty much done two years ago in one offseason, with the acquisitions of Orlando Brown and Joe Thuney, and the drafting of Creed Humphrey and Trey Smith.
A Chiefs staffer also told me something interesting at the team’s afterparty—the coaches felt like the Super Bowl’s unsung hero was right tackle Andrew Wylie, who happens to be the only holdover from the blowout loss to the Buccaneers two years ago. Wylie’s been criticized (Von Miller had his way with him early in the year), but Kansas City stuck with him, and he sparkled in dealing with Haason Reddick, among others, on Sunday night.
• Interesting note on the Kadarius Toney trade—the third-round pick the Chiefs sent the Giants for the 2021 first-round pick was actually the comp pick that Kansas City got for Ryan Poles landing the Bears GM job. So, effectively, that trade was Poles and a sixth-round pick for Toney, which illustrates the rich-get-richer dynamic at play with the comp picks going to teams that have diverse coaches and scouts plucked away by other organizations.
The departure of Eagles offensive coordinator Shane Steichen to Indianapolis leaves big shoes to fill for someone in Philadelphia.
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• The Eagles have some pretty immediate work ahead, with Shane Steichen off to Indy to become Colts head coach, Jonathan Gannon having stayed behind in Arizona to interview for the Cardinals head coaching job, QBs coach Brian Johnson an OC target for Baltimore, Washington and Carolina, and passing game coordinator Kevin Patullo potentially another name to watch.
In replacing Steichen, Nick Sirianni should have some answers. He could try and get Johnson to turn down other opportunities and stay as coordinator, or turn to Patullo, and the fact that Sirianni himself is an old offensive coordinator helps backstop the whole thing. Having to replace Gannon would be more difficult, with the timing of his candidacy in Arizona an issue. Two guys who I think would’ve been high on the Eagles’ DC list, Vic Fangio and Jerod Mayo, have already agreed to deals elsewhere.
I have heard, for what it’s worth, that the Eagles have made an effort to keep Gannon in the fold, with the Arizona interest having been rumored for a while.
• The franchise tag window opens a week from tomorrow, and by the time it closes on March 7, we’ll have a little bit of a tell on where the Ravens stand with Lamar Jackson.
Baltimore can put the non-exclusive tag on Jackson at $32.416 million. Or they can put the exclusive tag on him—right now, that number projects to $45.46 million (it can move via new QB deals and restructures between now and spring). The upside of putting the exclusive tag on him is it takes him off the market completely. The downside is that it could weaken the Ravens’ negotiating position, since they’d be working off a bigger number, and it’d put Jackson’s 2024 tag number at $54.55 million.
Bottom line, if you add those two things together—the desire to remove Jackson from the market and the willingness to negotiate from a tougher spot—then you can surmise that putting the exclusive tag on Jackson would be affirmation that the Ravens are going forward with the 2019 NFL MVP as their quarterback.
Conversely, if the Ravens prioritize their negotiating position and expose Jackson to the market, that’d tell me they’d really reckoned with the idea of moving on from their quarterback of the last five seasons. In that case, of course, other teams can come in and sign Jackson to an offer sheet, with the Ravens having the option to match the offer sheet, or collect two first-round picks from the team signing him.
So, yes, Jackson’s getting tagged. But there’s more to it than just that.
• The combine is also looming, two weeks from now. And you’d hope by then that all this coaching shuffling is over with. It used to be that by Senior Bowl week, things would be winding down. The idea that it wouldn’t be done by the time the NFL lands in Indy is nuts, even if the league really wants things to be more deliberate than they have been in the past.
By the time the combine starts, usually teams are done with their free agency meetings and their first set of draft meetings, and all of that is kind of tough to do if you aren’t sure what offense or defense you’re going to run in the fall.
