Boston Saint

Rookie QB. Team is on the road for a second week after a big win. I don’t have a warm fuzzy about this game. Then again, I haven’t had a warm fuzzy about the Saints in a while. Point is Mayfield tore us up, and there were plays for the Pats to make, but Jones sucks. Stroud doesn’t suck.

AsylumGuido

I posted the above right before the Carolina game. We can now update those numbers to "Dennis Allen led defenses are 10-2 against rookie QB's facing the Saints. And the Saints were something like 16-6 since 2006 when facing rookie QB's."

We can now look at facing rookie QB's as a positive instead of a negative. I know. It's a hard habit to overcome as fans, but it's been almost 20 years since we had that rookie QB jinx going on. It just goes to show how old we are.

Rugby Saint II

I like that that we are playing well on the road after pitching a shutout last week. The team should be highly motivated internally this week to show that last week wasn't a fluke.

AsylumGuido

Rell&Gold

Carr isn't much better than Jones he's just in a better situation.

AsylumGuido

Boston Saint

You really think Carr isn’t much better than Jones?

leilung

I was thinking the same thing BS. I don't think there's any metric where they're even close!

Sometimes, you just gotta let some folks go on and talk their crazy talk.

AsylumGuido

Yeah, Carr was in a much, much worse situation while with the Raiders. He never had a defense better than 20th in the league and most years it was in the bottom five. Many of his career numbers compare favorably to some of best passers in NFL history. He current sets 30th in total passing yards and can easily end this season around #25.

BakoSaint

Perhaps Carr was in a worse situation with the Raiders but we need to look at all sides of the context. With the Saints, Carr joined a team with a head coach who has one of the lowest winning percentages in history among coaches with a similar amount of experience. This is also the same coach who constructed the defense of the Raiders that Carr started his career with. DA had the opportunity to build the Raiders defense for two years before he drafted Carr, then Carr started his career with DA's defense, then DA got fired the early part of Carr's career he played with the defense DA built. It is one thing to have an inexperienced rookie coach who represents a roll of the dice and may prove great or awful, but it is another to join a team that is rolling with a coach who has proved awful for a long duration and having to hope for a miraculous turn around. I would argue that Carr has worse head coaching now than he had with the Raiders, where Jon Gruden was a formed former bowl winner and Jack Del Rio was a solid mid-tier head coach with a number of winning seasons under his belt, vs DA whose best season as a head coach was 7 wins. One could argue that the Saints better defense is offset by their worse head coaching and Carr is in no better a situation here.

Also, though Carr's early career was statistically impressive in some respects, there is no guarantee that he remains the same QB until age 40 or so like Brady, Brees, Manning, and Favre who were to some degree an anomalous streak of durable QBs when looking at league history. Plenty of QB's fade early in their 30's like Wilson, McNabb, Culpepper, Bledsoe, Brooks, Flacco, Sanchez, Bulger, Luck, Dalton, etc.

While the Raiders lacked a good defense, they had a lot of weapons on offense. If what they were missing was defense, they could have traded for a defensive star instead of Davante Adams, but they thought Carr needed even more help on offense and positioned him to put up massive numbers to make up for a weak defense. Instead with the addition of Adams and a career year from Jacobs at RB, Carr had an off year. When we was replaced by Jared Stidham at QB, the Raiders saw zero drop off, in fact Stidham was statistically a little better. There could be the concern that much like Matt Ryan, Derek Carr was propped up by a Raiders franchise that continually bet on him to be their golden boy and then spent big on offense at the expense of defense to drive the statistics that would justify their bet. The Raiders brought in offensive minded coaches, spent big on offense, all to make Carr look great, knowing this was a formula where a superb offense would likely have to pick up the slack for a mediocre defense, which is a formula that many teams have relied on in the past. But instead they got a pretty good and look at these stats offense that wasn't quite great enough to make up for their struggling defense. A reasonable person might conclude that Carr is just pretty good, not great, and he is getting older. Now he is saddled with a defensive minded head coach who can't win and an offense that has weapons on paper but lacks coaching and blocking to use them. I am just not sure thats an amazingly better situation.