Tag: 2023 season

Derek Carr’s deal listed among the NFL’s worst contracts

B/R believes Derek Carr has one of the worst contracts in the NFL, with a suggestion for what the Saints should have done last year at QB:

Derek Carr underperformed in his first season with the New Orleans Saints, struggling to hit his stride until the last third of the season — at which point it was too little, too late. The team is hoping for a faster start in 2024 after hiring a new offensive coaching staff aimed at putting Carr in a position to succeed.

Still, his underwhelming first year in New Orleans can’t be overlooked. In response, Bleacher Report’s Brad Gagnon called Carr’s contract one of the worst in the NFL after the disappointing year.

The bad return: Well in Year 1 with New Orleans, Derek Carr ranked below the league median in QBR for a Saints team that wasn’t particularly competitive at 9-8. And should anyone expect that to change dramatically? The soon-to-be 33-year-old hasn’t been a Pro Bowler since 2017.

The better option: They should have thrown in the towel on 2023 and started from scratch with Will Levis, who was still available when New Orleans selected Bryan Bresee 29th overall in last year’s draft.

It was frustrating to watch Carr in 2023 at times, but his contract is not that bad. He’s ranking 13th around the league in money per year. His 2024 salary cap hit ranks 20th in the league after the Saints restructured his contract a week ago. Carr also ranked 13th in passing yards (3,878), and 10th in touchdown passes (25). The Saints view his performance as right in line with his compensation, though everyone has different standards for what’s acceptable or not.

The Saints’ roster wasn’t at a point to throw in the towel, which rules out getting a rookie quarterback like Will Levis. Carr was disappointing, but to call his contract one of the worst in the league is an overstatement.

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All 32 NFL teams ranked by attendance in 2023 season (including the Saints)

Where all 32 NFL teams ranked by average home game attendance during the 2023 season (including the New Orleans Saints):

The New Orleans Saints have fallen into a slump in life without Drew Brees and Sean Payton, but the Who Dat Nation is still showing up and supporting their team. They’re certainly bringing a stronger presence to the Caesars Superdome than most teams around the league.

Here’s where all 32 teams (including the Saints) ranked in average attendance at home games in 2023, using numbers reported at ESPN:

Derek Carr sits outside of NFL analyst’s top-20 in final QB rankings

Derek Carr’s late-season surge gave confidence for 2024, but it wasn’t enough for this NFL analyst to consider him a top-20 quarterback in 2023:

New Orleans Saints quarterback Derek Carr has arguably been the most discussed player on the team in 2023. The expectations were high and unmet. Your opinion on Carr’s debut season depends on if his flashes hold more weight than the majority of the season in your mind. They don’t in the mind of NFL.com analyst Nick Shook .

Carr ranks as Shook’s 22nd best quarterback out of 66 passers who started last season. That’s a one spot better than he ranked in 2022. Shook suggests Carr’s inconsistencies are representative of the team’s similar struggles, writing:

Carr was supposed to finally answer the Saints’ long-running problem under center, one that has persisted since the moment Drew Brees retired. He may have done so, but it took him nearly an entire season to get there. The Saints were an incredibly frustrating operation in 2023 because they didn’t know who they wanted to be until the final month, and that included Carr, a quarterback who frequently checked down and inexplicably struggled to establish a connection with 2022 first-round pick Chris Olave until, well, the last couple of weeks. Dennis Allen nearly lost his job because of these issues (and a defense that didn’t live up to expectation), but the Saints are entering 2024 with all of the good vibes because of how they finished. Carr finally found a consistent rhythm and pushed the ball down the field, giving New Orleans reason to believe he could be worth the four-year, $150 million deal he signed in last March. And as always, he proved his toughness, starting in every game despite suffering multiple injuries through the course of 2023.

Shook is right to say that Carr’s most consistent performances came at the end of the year, but it wasn’t against strong competition. New Orleans won four of their last five games but only beat one team with a winning record, the 9-8 Tampa Bay Buccaneers. That low quality of competition is likely what kept Carr outside of the top 20 despite a late surge. He needs to start 2024 hot and carry that success over against another weak schedule.

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Steelers DL Cam Heyward fires back at fans who want him to retire

Cam Heyward has no patience for the haters who want him to retire.

2023 was a forgettable season for Pittsburgh Steelers defensive lineman Cam Heyward. An injury-riddled season forced Heyward to play basically on one leg but Heyward never gave up. Heyward posted this offseason that he underwent successful surgery and was looking forward to playing on two legs in 2024.

But this hasn’t stopped critics from calling for Heyward to retire. This comes from a combination of factors including his injury as well as his $22 million cap hit in 2024 on the final year of his current contract.

Heyward didn’t appreciate the armchair GMs and their hate for him after everything he has given this team and fired a shot at those cynical fans who want to see him gone.

As far as we are concerned, Heyward can play for the Steelers as long as he likes and we will support him no matter what. He’s the Ben Roethlisberger of the defensive side of the ball and has earned that level of respect. We can’t wait to see a healthy Heyward back on the field this season.

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Saints free agent report card: Was Johnathan Abram a good veteran signing?

Saints free agent report card: Was Johnathan Abram a good veteran signing?

The New Orleans Saints defense had an up-and-down season in 2023, but they found some smooth sailing in the latter half of the season. A lot of that had to do with some veterans stepping up and performing well

One of the players that broke out in the second half of the season was veteran safety Johnathan Abram, who spent the first half of the year on the practice squad.

To wrap up the series for last season’s most impactful free agent signings (we previously discussed Foster Moreau, Jamaal Williams, Nathan Shepherd, and Khalen Saunders), here is Abram’s 2023 report card:

Saints free agent report card: Was Nathan Shepherd a good veteran signing?

Our next New Orleans Saints 2023 free agent report card: Was Nathan Shepherd a good veteran signing at defensive tackle?

Few positions looked as different last season compared to the year before as the New Orleans Saints’ defensive tackles. With their position coach leaving for a promotion, the Saints allowed the entire group to test free agency while bringing in veteran replacements and spending their top draft pick on a new centerpiece.

So how did they perform individually? We’re keeping our 2023 Saints free agent report card series going after reviewing Foster Moreau and Jamaal Williams. Which leads us to the next question: was Nathan Shepherd a good veteran signing at defensive tackle?

Cowboys’ Pollard: ‘I was back’ starting with Week 11; the numbers say he wasn’t

From @ToddBrock24f7: The Cowboys RB says he felt fully recovered from his leg injury in a Nov. 19 win; the stats don’t show any improvement the rest of the way.

The Cowboys’ run game — or lack thereof —was certainly one of the disappointments of the team’s 2023 season. Running back Tony Pollard was set to be the bell cow for the first time after the offseason departure of two-time rushing champ Ezekiel Elliott, and the shifty change-of-pace back would finally get top billing in Dallas’s high-octane offense in Week 1.

But the fifth-year Memphis man was also coming off a brutal lower leg injury sustained less than eight months prior; a fractured fibula and high ankle sprain suffered in the playoff loss to the 49ers. He went on to rack up five yards per carry in the season opener and topped 120 yards a few weeks later against Arizona, but he didn’t resemble the same dynamic runner fans had seen prior to the injury.

Turns out, Pollard didn’t feel the same, either.

Interviewed multiple times during Super Bowl Week, Pollard revealed “The Carolina game is when I probably felt like I was back to my old self.”

The stats, unfortunately, don’t back up that pronouncement.

The Cowboys were already 6-3 coming into that visit to Charlotte. It was Week 11, just four days before Thanksgiving. The season was more than half over. That’s admittedly a long time for the team to have gone without their primary ball carrier feeling like he was 100%.

Dallas had appeared to take offseason precautions to make sure they had backfield depth behind Pollard. They signed veteran Ronald Jones. They drafted the electrifying Deuce Vaughn. Rico Dowdle was once again healthy. Malik Davis waited in the wings.

Jones was dumped immediately after serving a two-game suspension to start the season. The Vaughn experiment was brought to a merciful end after five painful weeks of wasted carries and minimal results. Dowdle saw single-digit carries more games than not. Davis never took a game snap with the offense.

And while Pollard now defines that mid-November Panthers game as a turning point in his season, his numbers in the nine games leading up to that contest and the nine-game span that followed — which includes the postseason — look nearly identical.

Att Yds TDs Yds/Att Att/Gm Yds/Gm
Games 1-9 135 529 2 3.92 15.0 58.8
Games 10-18 132 532 5 4.03 14.7 59.1

Perhaps the most troubling figure there is yards per rushing attempt. Consider that Pollard averaged 5.3 yards per carry as a rookie, then 5.5 in 2021, and 5.2 in 2022. His previous season low had been 4.3 in 2020.

Those years all saw Pollard used in combination with Elliott. His first season as Dallas’s clear-cut lead back? Just 4.0 yards per carry.

Pollard may have felt like he was finally “back” starting in Week 11, but in actuality, he produced no differently whatsoever from that point forward, apart from a few extra touchdowns.

He did go on to notch a 1,000-yard season, but under a 17-game schedule, that once-venerated plateau doesn’t have the same mystique. It requires a rather pedestrian 59 yards per game now to hit 1,000; Pollard averaged 59.1, ending up at 1,005. He had more outings with under 40 yards (three) than with over 80 (one).

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Pollard has said he would like to remain a Cowboy. “If I could choose, I would love to be in Dallas,” he told Blogging the Boys just last week. “But at the end of the day, it is a business. So it is what it is, and you have to be ready for what comes.”

And what’s coming for Pollard is, more than likely, free agency. He played 2023 on a franchise tag, and it’s difficult to imagine the team feels like they got their $10.9 million’s worth.

They may have even been willing to wait through the early part of the season, as he recovered fully from that nasty injury, for him to feel like his old self. Problem is, even once he says he did, he never played like his old self.

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Post-Super Bowl NFL power rankings have the Saints in the middle of the pack

There were ups and downs throughout the season, but a strong finish placed the Saints in the top half of these post-Super Bowl NFL power rankings:

The New Orleans Saints find themselves at No. 15 in the NFL.com’s Eric Edholm final power rankings of 2023. This leaves the Saints sitting in the middle of the pack, which feels appropriate with the entire season. There were long stretches of feeling like the Saints were a below-average team, and at times their poor results proved those doubts valid. New Orleans ended the season strongly, though.

Here’s what Edholm wrote in ranking the Saints at No. 15:

The team’s annual salary-cap surgery must begin soon, given that the Saints open the offseason with the most work left to do. They’re projected to be more than $80 million over the cap as things stand now, and even with some obvious sources for savings, this major hurdle threatens to weaken the team at several key positions: on both lines of scrimmage, at cornerback and at wide receiver. New Orleans also must figure out the future of important but expensive specialists in Alvin Kamara and Taysom Hill. With Derek Carr locked in this offseason at QB, there’s a worry that the Saints might not be able to do enough to surround him with the kind of talent he needs. This offense was out of sorts throughout 2023, prone to wild swings in effectiveness on a week-to-week basis, and there’s no clear path to adding major talent this offseason. Oh, and Dennis Allen is back for a third season with a lot to prove. How are you feeling about this team right now, Saints fans?

Numerically, No. 16 would be the definition of average in the NFL. The Saints played well enough to end the season right above that. In reality, that’s still an average team, and they barely make the “top half” of the league. They weren’t good enough to get into the playoffs New Orleans benefitted from a weak schedule down the stretch, but a win against the NFC South-champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Week 17 makes the placement understandable.

In order to improve on these results, New Orleans has to find a way to even out those ups and downs. Better first half performances are a must, and they have to show it against better teams. They’ll likely have a weak schedule again, and the Saints have to take advantage of it better than they did this past season.

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Former Bears players, coaches in Super Bowl LVIII

Here’s a look at the former Bears who are playing or coaching in Super Bowl LVIII:

The 2023 NFL season comes to a close tonight when the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs face off in Super Bowl LVIII for a chance to be world champions.

There will be some familiar faces for Bears fans to watch on Super Bowl Sunday, including Matt Nagy, Dave Toub, Tashaun Gipson, Deon Bush and more.

Here’s a look at the former Bears who are playing or coaching in Super Bowl LVIII:

Cowboys leaders shut out of major awards at NFL Honors

From @ToddBrock24f7: Dak Prescott, CeeDee Lamb, Micah Parsons, and DaRon Bland came up empty in the biggest end-of-year awards at NFL Honors.

The 2023 Cowboys were well-represented in the major awards handed out at NFL Honors in Las Vegas Thursday night. But they went home empty-handed in the night’s biggest categories.

Quarterback Dak Prescott, wide receiver CeeDee Lamb, linebacker/edge rusher Micah Parsons, and cornerback DaRon Bland were up for three of the evening’s top accolades. And while Lamb did collect the trophy for the Next Gen State Moment of the Year, that was the only piece of hardware to go to someone wearing the star.

Parsons and Bland were both up for Defensive Player of the Year, but Cleveland’s Myles Garrett was recognized instead. Parsons finished third in the voting; Bland finished fifth.

Prescott and Lamb were finalists to be Offensive Player of the Year but lost to the 49ers’ Christian McCaffrey. Lamb came in third in voting, while Prescott finished in fifth place.

Prescott was also in the running to be the league’s Most Valuable Player, but that honor went to Baltimore’s Lamar Jackson in a runaway vote. Prescott was the runner-up for that award, earning 17 second-place votes, 13 third-place votes, 11 fourth-place votes, and six fifth-place votes.

A couple other Cowboys were also shut out during the evening’s presentations. While DeMarcus Lawrence was the team’s nominee for the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Cameron Heyward became the latest deserving recipient. And Cowboys legend Darren Woodson was denied entry into the Pro Football Hall of Fame after eight times as a semifinalist or finalist.

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