EJ Manuel: QB is “pretty solid,” but job is Carr’s.

Hold the Raiders’ quarterback controversy. It died Sunday before it started.

Derek Carr was ordinary-to-lousy in the Raiders’ previous two games before being injured. Cue backup EJ Manuel, who came to the Raiders after fading badly in Buffalo, where he’d been a first-round pick.

Had Manuel sparkled and led the Raiders to a win Sunday, busting their mini-slump, it would have made for interesting discussions.

Instead, the Raiders lost to the Ravens, and Manuel was overall not scintillating. He completed 13 of 26 passes for 159 yards and a passer rating of 82.1.

Head coach Jack Del Rio said, “I thought he did a pretty solid job as a backup guy coming into a tough situation, and handled himself well.”

Manuel knows the clock is ticking. The medical people said Carr was likely to miss two to six weeks, but he was back in uniform at practice late in the week, throwing passes, and he hammered Del Rio to let him play Sunday.

“Decided that it was best not to play him today,” Del Rio said Sunday, and it’s not clear whether the missing pronoun at the start of that quote referred to team doctors or just to Del Rio. Either way, it certainly seemed like a wise way to handle your franchise quarterback, have him sit out at least one game with a broken bone in his back (a transverse process fracture).

So this may have been Manuel’s shot, and it started with a thud. Four plays into the Raiders’ first drive, near midfield, Manuel hit tight end Jared Cook with a short pass, Cook fumbled, and cornerback Jimmy Smith picked up the ball and ran 47 yards for a touchdown and a 14-0 Ravens lead.

Manuel sucked it up admirably. He led a 12-play drive that ended in a field goal, then hit Michael Crabtree with a 41yard touchdown strike. In the first half, Manuel was 7-for-10 for 96 yards. But in the second? He was 6-for-16 for 63 yards, and the third quarter opened with back-to-back three-and-outs, capped by an incomplete pass and a sack.

Later in the third quarter, Manuel overthrew Crabtree badly on what would have been a 14-yard touchdown, but the QB’s 10-yard scramble two plays later led to a touchdown that brought the Raiders to within 24-17.

Manuel probably did enough to make the Raiders feel good about their backup. But a QB controversy? No.