Derek Carr Might Not Be the Upgrade the Saints Think They’re Paying For

Derek Carr is headed for New Orleans. The veteran quarterback, released by the Las Vegas Raiders last month, has reportedly agreed to a four-year deal with the Saints. It’s the start of Carr’s second act but also the start of a new act for this franchise, which is making its first multiyear commitment to a starting quarterback since Drew Brees retired after the 2021 season.

The deal is reportedly worth $150 million total, including $100 million in guarantees, which feels rich for a team that was already sitting $18 million above the 2023 salary cap before the deal was even announced. But as New Orleans has proved repeatedly over the past decade, the cap can be manipulated when necessary. That manipulation might require some tough financial decisions—like letting safety Marcus Williams leave in free agency a year ago and most likely letting receiver Michael Thomas do the same next week—but it has also allowed the Saints to make bold additions to the roster seemingly every offseason. The new league year doesn’t start until next Wednesday, and the team will already be on the board with the top veteran QB who was available on the open market whenever the pact with Carr is made official.

Because of that ability to work around the tight cap situation and make headline-grabbing additions every year, it can be difficult for anyone who isn’t paying close attention to recognize the real issue created by GM Mickey Loomis’s chaotic brand of roster building. It will never really limit his capacity to lure talent to New Orleans, but it has prevented the Saints from truly starting over after the Brees era hit its expiration date a couple of years ago. Brees has been retired for two years and Sean Payton is now coaching another team but, somehow, it still feels like their team. Maybe bringing in Carr will change that, but that will require some winning and, based on the state of the roster, the cap situation, and the warranted skepticism of Dennis Allen and his coaching staff, this doesn’t seem like a coupling destined for success or longevity.

This doesn’t quite feel like the Rams trading for Matthew Stafford. Or the Bucs signing Tom Brady. Those teams provided their new quarterbacks with deep, talented rosters. With a long list of free agents and some real work to do to get back in the black, the Saints team that went 7-10 and finished 19th in DVOA in 2022 is going to lose some talent over the next month or two. Marcus Davenport, David Onyemata, Shy Tuttle, and the aforementioned Thomas are all slated to hit free agency. Jarvis Landry, Bradley Roby, and Mark Ingram will also need new deals but I’m not sure how much those potential losses would matter. Per Spotrac, the Saints currently rank 27th in cap space, and according to Tankathon’s value chart they rank 21st in draft capital. The Raiders team Carr left is arguably in better shape than his new one.

And it might be fair to wonder whether the Saints are getting a significant upgrade over the quarterbacks who had been on the roster. Jameis Winston, who is now expected to be cut to make room for the Carr signing, and Andy Dalton, who will hit free agency next week, have both outplayed Carr in recent seasons. Winston was better than Carr in 2021, when Winston finished his injury-shortened season ranked second in EPA per play, per RBSDM.com. And Dalton was statistically better in some respects last year, when he finished sixth in PFF pass grade despite playing with a banged-up supporting cast. Over the last two seasons, since Brees’s retirement, Saints quarterbacks matched Carr’s production and did so with a lesser supporting cast than what Carr was working with in Las Vegas, with Davante Adams (in 2022), Hunter Renfrow, Darren Waller, and Josh Jacobs.

I’d still take Carr over both Winston and Dalton in a vacuum but I don’t think the gap between New Orleans’s new guy and the guys he’s replacing is all that big, especially because Carr’s own performance has been on the decline for a good four years now. In 2022, he posted his worst EPA-per-dropback average since 2018, his highest off-target throw rate in four years, and the highest interception rate of his entire career, per TruMedia. The Saints certainly did not buy high on Carr.

The question that will determine whether this is a successful partnership is an obvious one: How much does adding Carr move the needle for a team whose needle needs to move a lot? He’s a quarterback and a pretty talented one at that, so it feels like it should make a big difference—the NFL is a quarterback-driven league, after all. But there’s also a wealth of compelling evidence suggesting that it won’t and that Carr’s best football is probably behind him. The signing feels more like a cosmetic Band-Aid than anything, which kind of describes every major move this team has made over the past few years. It helps to create the illusion that the Saints are going for it when, in reality, they’re just running in place.