Raiders Quarterback Derek Carr is Focused on the Here and Now

Las Vegas Raiders quarterback Derek Carr doesn't let outside speculation get to his head during the season.

When you're a veteran quarterback like Derek Carr who has never led a team past the first round of the postseason, it's never going to get easy.

The unfortunate truth about any sport is that winning cures everything.

In what is Carr's ninth season with the Raiders, winning has been tough to come by. Because of that, his future as the club's leader becomes questioned more and more with every loss.

But the three-time Pro Bowler leaves that to the fans and critics to worry about during the season.

"I've always tried my best to, as I've gotten older in my career, just eliminate all of those things," Carr said in his Wednesday press conference. "Gru [Jon Gruden] would always tell me, he said: 'All of those things are going to happen when you play quarterback in NFL.’ Whenever you have a bad stretch of games, or a losing stretch of games, or anything like that, that stuff is going to happen. And so, for me, I don't. I should have been traded for eight years now. It is what it is. We have passionate fans, and we have passionate people who just want to see us win. And so, when we don't, obviously they get mad, and they think: 'Oh, we got to fix something,' and stuff like that. And you can understand that as fans. 

"But this is the most complex game in the world and so sometimes you've just got to understand our opinions really don't matter. There are facts that you're trying to learn from coach, and we're trying to do the systems right, and you just try your best as an athlete just to keep your eye on what you're supposed to do and what you can control. And so, that's how I've always been. As I've gotten older, it's been, I would say, definitely easier because once you've heard it once, I've heard it a million times. I was supposed to be gone, like I said, eight years ago, and I'm still here."

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