Oakland Raiders: Derek Carr offers glimmer of hope for 2018 season

The Oakland Raiders suffered one of the most underachieving and disappointing seasons in 2017 – however, quarterback Derek Carr offered fans a glimmer of hope ahead of the 2018 season.

To say the Oakland Raiders were a massive disappointment in 2017 would be putting it kindly. The team underachieved in epic proportions, which paved the way for a 6-10 record that sent former HC Jack Del Rio packing and ushered in the return of Chucky.

New HC Jon Gruden has a monumental task before him. He’s inheriting a team that possibly overachieved in 2016, on its way to a 12-4 record and its first playoff berth since Gruden’s Buccaneers smashed the Raiders in Super Bowl 37 and underachieved in 2017, stumbling and bumbling their way to a terrible year.

Gruden’s task is figuring out which team is the real team – the 2016 or the 2017 version – and finding a way to maximize the talent he has on hand.

The Raiders were terrible in all three phases of the game last year. Offense. Defense. And not so special teams. If there were more phases of the game, the Raiders probably would have been terrible in those as well. That’s just kinda how the year went.

And perhaps no one single player was more disappointing last year than quarterback Derek Carr.

The ink was barely even dry on that nifty new $125 million dollar, five-year contact extension he signed when Carr put together a pretty forgettable 2017 campaign.

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Oh, statistically speaking, it can be argued he had a decent season. He completed 63 percent of his passes for 3,496 yards. He tossed 22 touchdowns, but did have 13 interceptions to go along with it, which matched his career high.

All in all, it was – from a certain statistical standpoint – not a bad year, right?

But, if you look a little deeper into the numbers, you’d see that 2017 was actually not a great overall year for Carr. His interception rate of 2.5 percent, was the highest of his career. He led just one game winning drive (the fewest since his rookie season) after engineering four in 2015 and seven in 2016.

Carr’s touchdown rate was down to 4.3 percent – lowest since his rookie season, and his QB rating of 86.4 was also his lowest since his rookie season – as were his yards per attempt (6.5), yards per game (233.1).

We could go on, but you get the point.

Now, there are a number of factors that went into Carr’s less than stellar 2017 campaign. Some like to point to an offensive line that failed to protect him well. And you can’t discount that entirely. However, the offensive line gave up just 20 sacks of Carr on the year (only four more than the 2016 total), and still good for third fewest in the entire league.

There was also the injury he suffered in week four’s loss to the Denver Broncos. After suffering broken bones in his back, and ultimately sitting out just one game, Carr returned to the field and never looked quite right after that. He had some terrific moments, sure – such as the team’s thrilling week seven win over Kansas City – but Carr never looked comfortable and never looked like the legitimate MVP candidate he was in 2016.

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Though it’s fair to say that Carr’s regression started a week before his injury in Oakland’s 27-10 beatdown at the hands of Washington. Carr hasn’t looked as bad as he did in that game since his rookie season in going 19/31 for just 118 yards with a touchdown, and two interceptions. He also absorbed four sacks in the game.

The larger part of the equation for Carr’s regression though, can be tied to the promotion of Todd Downing to the offensive coordinator’s chair. It was easy to think the machine was humming along just fine the first two weeks of the season with a dramatic win over Tennessee and a thorough thumping of the Jets.

But week three in Washington is when the wheels really started to fall off.

Carr never really looked comfortable in Downing’s system. He checked down far too quickly, dumped off a lot of balls, was inaccurate during stretches, and rarely took shots down the field. It’s sad, but E.J. Manuel looked more comfortable running Downing’s plays than Carr did.

Although they have plenty of questions to answer, it’s fair to say that if the Raiders want to get over that hump and become a legitimate playoff contender again, it’s going to start with Carr. Gruden, Greg Olson, and now, Brian Callahan, are tasked with getting Carr back on track and maximizing his talents.

They’re tasked with getting him back to the MVP-caliber form he had in 2016.

If you watched Carr this past season, you might think it’s going to be a Herculean task and that Gruden and company are going to be hard pressed to do it.

However, this past weekend at the Pro Bowl, Carr offered us all a glimmer of hope that 2018 may be a much better year for him and the team.

After being named to replace Tom Brady – the third trip he’s made in his four-year career – Carr entered the game in the third quarter and the AFC squad down by ten. Carr then engineered a five-play, 53-yard touchdown drive that took up just over three minutes to cut the NFC’s lead to three points.

On that drive, Carr connected with Colts wideout T.Y. Hilton for a 39-yard catch that set up LeSean McCoy‘s two-yard touchdown plunge.

Carr did throw an interception – something that plagued him this year – but the NFC was unable to capitalize on it, scoring no points off the turnover.

Carr and the AFC got the ball back with just under four minutes remaining in the game – and in good field position, starting at the NFC 47-yard line. Faced with a tough fourth and seven though, Carr hooked up with Jarvis Landry for twelve yards and a fresh set of downs.

A few plays later, Carr drilled a bullet to Titan’s tight end Delanie Walker, good for an 18-yard touchdown, which provided the final margin of the AFC’s come from behind, 24-23 victory. On the day – or at least, in his limited appearance – Carr went 11/15 for 115 yards with the touchdown and the pick. Not bad for playing just over one quarter.

Now, some will undoubtedly argue that the Pro Bowl is a glorified scrimmage and nobody is really going all that hard out there. Fair enough. That assessment isn’t necessarily wrong.

Scrimmage or not though, the important takeaway is that Carr looked like a different quarterback on that soggy field than he did for most of the actual season. Carr was accurate with his passes. They had some zip on them and – unburdened by Downing’s system – he looked free. Like he was having fun again.

More than that, he looked like the quarterback who has it in him to engineer some late game magic, rallying the AFC to 14 points and a come from behind win. It’s the kind of late game magic we didn’t see in 2017. Like, at all.

In short, he looked more like the 2016 version of Derek Carr than the 2017 version. Which is a good thing. A very good thing.

In 2016, you never really got the sense that the Raiders were out of a ballgame. You always sat on the edge of your seat, waiting for that late game Carr magic to start working. And it did. Seven times in their 12 wins.

2017 was the exact opposite though. When the Raiders got themselves into a hole, you never got the sense that they were going to be able to fight their way out of it. That magic – and Carr’s confidence – were most definitely missing.

So, what does it all mean? Ultimately, nothing. The Pro Bowl is, as many say, a glorified scrimmage where guys aren’t playing at full speed.

But for one game anyway, now that he’s out from under the thumb of Downing, and by extension, former HC Jack Del Rio, Carr looked a lot closer to being the quarterback he was in 2016, when he was a legitimate MVP candidate, than the quarterback he was last year – which was decidedly not an MVP candidate.

That magic is still in there, under the surface. We saw it for a bit this past weekend. Now, it’s up to Gruden and company to dig beneath the surface to bring it all back out of him again.

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