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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