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Quote:

Originally Posted by hitta (Post 1009479)

Can you honestly say that any QB would have won in the situation that Carr was put into? The guy was literally getting killed back there. He's had no offensive line, subpar receiver play, ridiculously bad playcalling and not too many other things on the offense to help him out. People here just don't want to go through what we've been through the last few years. We want change and it's understandable. We needed a scapegoat and it's easy to point at him. That said, I still think Carr can be successful.

Not being the first person to blame doesn't make a QB blameless. Ultimately I do believe Carr came into a virtually impossible situation but he only made it more impossible by being his mediocre self, taking a big payday, and becoming an accomplice to false promises and excuse culture. The Saints were built to fail with a flawed oline of first round busts and aging injury prone players and a 'trade up' draft strategy to minimize assets long term to win now, strangely by drafting expensive long term project players out of small schools. Mickey Loomis has mismanaged the Saints cap and roster for years and in his effort to get more for less has gotten a lot less flexibility, forcing the team to keep and restructure injury prone players, busts, and overrrated role players because its always cheaper on a 1 year basis than taking the dead cap hit, even though it would save big long term to move on. Carr came to New Orleans with Michael Thomas as the #1 receiver even though all true Saints fans knew Michael Thomas was 90%+ likely to never stay on the field. Rasheed Shaheed was another top receiver as an extremely undersized college injury reclamation project. Chris Olave had already had two concussions as undersized player before Carr arrived. Alvin Kamara was clearly an aging RB beginning to decline. The Saints clearly could not provide Carr consistent protection or consistent weapons to do more than he did in Vegas. Yet the premise of his acquisition was that the Saints defense would get Carr to the playoffs. Yet, the Saints defense was made up of a core of aging players, many from the 2017 draft or earlier, who were all about to decline at once, only a strength if you pretend father time doesnt exist or that a bunch of first round projects are going to be great for a team that hasn't drafted well in many years. And the Saints had a head coach, DA, who never had a winning season.

Ultimately Carr came into a situation where he couldn't succeed, a situation as bad or worse than the Raiders where he failed, and he came into that situation because a known idiot GM, who the year before had gone all-in on DeShaun Watson, was offering Carr far more than any other team. Carr's brilliant agent convinced the Saints to bid against themselves for a washed up mediocre QB whose average to slightly above average skill set was not going to be the difference maker on a team without a dominant supporting cast. He used the Jets who didn't want Carr but wanted leverage to get Aaron Rodgers cheaper by presenting an alternative, while Carr used the Jets, so both the Saints and Rodgers got played by the fake bidding war so the Jets could get Rodgers cheaper and the Saints would have to pay more for Carr. In the end Carr claims he told his agent it wasn't about money and to give the Saints good price, but this is just a ridiculous lie. Carr and his agent extracted virtually the same annual pay from the Saints that Aaron Rodgers got from the Jets as a super bowl winner and recent two time MVP. Rodgers may not have worked out for the Jets, but he came to them in a similar situation as Manning to the Broncos and Brady to the Bucs, and clearly offered MVP upside, while Carr was clearly a second rate decent QB, a younger Andy Dalton or Philip Rivers.

Carr didn't come to the Saints to win a championship, he came to the Saints to get his bag so he could buy Rolls Royce's and start a Youtube channel reviewing them. In that sense he succeeded. But ultimately he didn't go to the team with the best chance to succeed on a reasonable contract that increased their chance to succeed, he signed up for a train wreck to get top dollar, no different than DeShaun Watson, except that he raped an old drunk and a confused widow. Watson may have secured a fully guaranteed contract, but Carr assured that his contract was also effectively fully guaranteed, by manipulating a feeble minded GM to overpay, knowing that GM would always be scrambling to get under the salary cap from his financial incompetency, and would thus have to restructure Carr annually to get under the cap, and could never afford to cut him.

The simple truth is that at this stage in his career, just as when the Saints signed him, Derek Carr does not have upside. He is who he is. The upside is that he doesn't decline further and just plateaus. If Carr is the 14th highest paid QB and the 14th highest performing QB on some metric, or whatever, that doesn't mean he is fairly paid. When you pay a QB who is not a top 5 QB, but know you probably need a top 5 QB to win it all, you are not paying for whether they are currently the #10, #15, or #20 QB, you are paying for the upside of how probable it is that they could become a top 5 QB, because thats what it takes to win. A #20 QB who is young and could be top 5 soon is more valuable than a #10 QB who has a decade of evidence that they will never be better. If you aren't first place you are last place. You have to have an incredible young supporting cast with extreme upside of its own to win without a top 5 QB. There are many formulas to win in this league but none of them involve paying top 10-15 money for an old mediocre QB who can never be top 5, and pairing him with an old aging core of support cast, and no salary cap flexibility to add other pieces that push you over the top if you surprisingly emerge as a 10-11 win type team.

Carr didn't consider the formulas to win in this league, he considered maxing out his payday, and perhaps thats fair. Players can't be expected to be GMs. Most can't fully understand the salary cap. They are not masters of evaluating rosters. Yet, a QB who can do those things will have a better chance of winning a ring, and thats just the reality. When Brady left New England I don't know that he chose the biggest payday. He chose a team with a young core, tons of cap room to add young stars, and a winning coach who was respected around the league and just needed a QB to go all the way. Peyton Manning did the same with the Broncos. Drew Brees did not go to an old team with extreme cap constraints and few draft picks where he would have to win with a team primarily made up of Jim Hasletts leftovers and where Joe Horn would need to be restructured to get under the cap and remain an effective player in 2009 for the Saints to win a ring. Derek Carr is a limited B+ type quarterback who chose a D+ situation in order to get his payday, and made it a D- situation with his payday. He probably didn't know any better, but it doesn't matter, the result is the same. At some level if a journeyman QB wants to win a ring, they have to either be lucky, or think like a good GM to identify the best situation to win. Carr couldn't do that. All he could do is tell himself that he is great and that getting Aaron Rodgers money without a playoff win was his great self giving the Saints a great discount.