Raiders’ Carr still confident
ALAMEDA, Calif. — The touchdown passes and yards are down. The interceptions and sacks are up.
The straight upward trajectory Derek Carr’s career took for his first three seasons in the NFL hit a speed bump this season, contributing to the Oakland Raiders’ fall from a 12-win team to one almost certain to miss the postseason.
But rather than being discouraged by the results, the quarterback said he will use the lessons from this season to build for the future and that a year from now he will be “a better player … because of what I went through.”
“I use it all to just fuel the fire,” Carr said Thursday. “There’s been things that I’ve gone through this year that I’ve never been through, and I’m learning how to deal with those things — and not just deal with them, but execute them at a high level.”
Carr had few setbacks last season, when he led Oakland to seven comeback wins and was one of the most promising quarterbacks in the league. He threw for 3,937 yards and 28 touchdowns with only six interceptions before a broken leg in the next-to-last game ended his year before he got to play in the postseason.
Carr turned that performance into a $125 million, five-year contract in the offseason that briefly made him the NFL’s highest-paid player, but the performance hasn’t matched that level. He’s on pace for his lowest yards per pass, fewest touchdown throws and worst passer rating since his rookie season in 2014.
His path is not an unusual one. He became the 13th quarterback in the past 30 years to start at least 10 games in his first season and have his passer rating improve each of the next two seasons. Only Troy Aikman followed that with another year of improvement, leading the Dallas Cowboys to a Super Bowl title in his fourth season.
The other 11 quarterbacks’ passer ratings dropped by an average of nearly 10 points in the fourth year, a group that includes quarterbacks such as Peyton Manning and Cam Newton.
“The experience he’s getting, he’s definitely growing,” Raiders coach Jack Del Rio said. “Even the very best, even the very elite quarterbacks of all time weren’t perfect every year. Derek is a good football player. We’re going to win a lot of games together here.”