With Khalil Mack and Amari Cooper gone from the Raiders, the next question maybe isn’t whether the team wants to move quarterback Derek Carr but whether it can keep him.
Marcus Thompson II of TheAthletic.com reports that Carr currently has a “fractured relationship” with his teammates. The reportedly fractured relationship between Carr and his teammates is rooted in a loss of confidence in the quarterback, as exacerbated by game film from the London contest against the Seahawks that “showed what looked like him crying after being sacked and injuring his arm.”
“They saw his face,” Thompson writes. “They heard his whimper. They witnessed him explain on the sidelines. They assuredly watched it again in film session. It’s hard to see how Carr can lead this team again.”
It was indeed curious, to say the least, to see video of what appeared to be Carr crying in the melting-face way that a kid would cry after falling off his bike. If Thompson’s report is accurate, Carr’s teammates regard it as something worse than curious.
This doesn’t mean the Raiders will move on from Carr, but whether and to what extent the locker room believes in Carr could be a factor in coach Jon Gruden’s ultimate assessment as to whether Carr should or shouldn’t be the quarterback in 2019. As noted on Monday, his contract pays out an average of $19.6 million over the next four years, which could make him tradeable. If not, the Raiders will have to decide by the third day of the 2019 waiver period whether to keep Carr and pay him a guaranteed salary of $19.9 million next year or cut him and find another quarterback.