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Derek Carr Retires from NFL at 34: Reviewing a Complicated and Strange Legacy

Photo of Scott Kacsmar Scott Kacsmar12/05/2025 - 10:06 am
Derek Carr #4 of the New Orleans Saints looks on during a preseason game at Caesars Superdome on August 13, 2023 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
(Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images)

The NFL had some surprise retirement news over the weekend as Saints quarterback Derek Carr is calling it quits after 11 seasons. The 34-year-old Carr has a damaged shoulder with a labral tear and rotator cuff degeneration. Surgery is an option, but there is no guarantee he will ever return to 100% of what he was, so this is apparently the end for his playing career.

It just goes to show that even with advanced medicine, not everyone is going to have Tom Brady’s maniacal drive to play until they’re 45 years old. They also won’t have the luck to avoid so many serious injuries for so many years.

With Carr retiring, I thought we’d take one last look at his career and its complicated legacy. You could make a case that out of the 30 quarterbacks to throw at least 245 touchdown passes in NFL history, Carr objectively had the worst team success with zero playoff wins and only two of his 11 teams making the postseason.

In fact, Carr holds the NFL record for most career pass attempts (5,785) without a playoff win. It is a record that Andy Dalton (5,614) could take from him soon, as he’s fewer than 200 attempts away.

But there’s also the fact that Carr is the first player in NFL history to get paid $25 million per season. He retires with more MVP votes (six in 2016) than Ben Roethlisberger and Russell Wilson (zero each) ever received in their careers. He also ranks No. 5 in pass completions (3,765) through a player’s age-33 season, so he was on track to possibly finish in the top 10 in yards and touchdowns if his career lasted longer.

Except it didn’t, so here is his career eulogy.

Derek Carr: The Passive Passer

While the NFL is a very physically-demanding league, quarterback is the most cerebral position. You cannot understate the importance of how observing another quarterback can impact the mentality that player will have when they take the field.

For example, Aaron Rodgers watched (from the bench) Brett Favre throw so many game-killing interceptions in Green Bay that it seemed to make him very risk-averse as a passer in all situations except for 3rd-and-long. He wasn’t going to be the guy on the wrong end of a game-losing interception like Favre often was.

Likewise, Carr watched his older brother David take an absolute beating in the NFL with sacks. David Carr was the No. 1 overall pick in the 2002 draft, so he went to the league’s last expansion team in the Houston Texans, where he suffered 76 sacks in his rookie season. The older Carr would also lead the league in sacks taken in 2004 (49) and 2005 (68). He’s remembered as a bust, and his career as a starter basically lasted six seasons.

We know now that quarterbacks have the most control over their sack numbers, even more so than the offensive line. But his brother David’s bad experience seemed to have an impact on how Derek would play the game.

Derek Carr wasn’t going to be a human piñata when the Raiders used the No. 36 pick on him in the 2014 draft. While David’s career sack rate was 10.54%, Derek Carr’s career sack rate is just 4.98%, less than half of big bro’s and low enough to put him on a list of fewer than two dozen quarterbacks to stay under 5.0%.

Sack avoidance is a great quarterback trait, and it was one of Carr’s best qualities. But it sometimes was a weakness as he wasn’t fond of holding the ball to extend plays and possibly gain bigger chunks of yards.

Carr’s interception rate was also just 1.9%, which is 11th in NFL history. As I hinted at in a 2018 tweet, avoiding sacks and interceptions are good things, but Carr still had a tendency to lose games even when he avoided those types of negative plays.

Sure enough, Carr had 25 losses in his career where he didn’t have multiple sacks or interceptions. That’s easily the most through any quarterback’s age-33 season and he likely would have broken the career record (Drew Brees – 32) if he played longer:

Another reason cited for this loss was that Carr had the least defensive help of virtually all of his peers from the 21st century. This is arguably true. Carr’s average defense ranked 23.8 in points per drive allowed, the worst among these 28 quarterbacks:

Derek Carr - Most Fourth-Quarter Comeback Wins Thru Year X, NFL History

Only once did Carr have a defense ranked higher than No. 15, but that also adds credence to the idea that he should have been more aggressive as a passer since he knew it was usually going to take a certain number of points to win with the Raiders.

Yet, Carr had a bad habit of checking down too often. His yards per attempt (7.1) is basically the league average for his career era. Carr struggled with balancing his aggression in his career in New Orleans. There was a 2023 game against Tampa Bay where he checked down to running back Alvin Kamara 13 times for 33 yards, a record for futility.

There’s also the fact that Carr was annually one of the least valuable rushing quarterbacks in an era where almost every quarterback can run for the occasional first down on third-and-long. But Carr was not mobile enough to give his teams much of anything in that department. He also fumbled 90 times, including two seasons where he led the league in fumbles.

Carr was a pocket passer with limited mobility who could avoid sacks but didn’t push the ball down the field enough to compensate. With Kirk Cousins getting benched last season in Atlanta, this style of quarterback is going extinct in the NFL.

It’s hard to argue with that too. Carr was just 77-93 as a starter, and much like his brother, there weren’t many big wins to celebrate against quality opponents.

Maybe there is something to this DNA thing.

Derek Carr and the Rationing of Luck

Maybe the most perplexing thing about Derek Carr’s career was that despite his losing record and passive playing style, he had a lot of fourth-quarter comebacks (4QC) and game-winning drives (GWD).

Since Carr entered the NFL in 2014, only Matthew Stafford (29) has more 4QC wins than Carr (28). Stafford is also the only player with more GWDs (40) than Carr (35) since 2014.

In fact, Carr had the most fourth-quarter comeback (4QC) wins in a player’s first three, seven, nine, and 10 seasons and was tied for the most in the first four, five, and six seasons in NFL history:

This comes even with Carr not leading a single 4QC in his two seasons with the Saints in 2023-24. One might argue he has these records because of a high number of opportunities, because he trailed often with the Raiders.

But when you look at Carr’s opportunity records, his winning rates are solid. Carr was 28-48 (.368) at 4QC opportunities and 36-49 (.424) at all 4QC/GWD opportunities where he had the ball in a tied or one-score game in the fourth quarter or overtime. That .424 winning rate was the ninth best among active starters.

The weirdest part is that Carr had a higher winning percentage in games with a 4QC/GWD opportunity with the Raiders than he did in all other games. That is no longer true when you factor in New Orleans, but the numbers being this close are very weird compared to most quarterbacks:

  • Derek Carr was 36-49 (.424) in 4QC/GWD opportunities and 41-44 (.482) in all other games (+5.8%).
  • Matthew Stafford is 52-64-1 (.449) in 4QC/GWD opportunities and 61-54 (.530) in all other games (+8.1%).
  • Russell Wilson is 44-59-1 (.428) in 4QC/GWD opportunities and 86-26 (.768) in all other games (+34.0%).
  • Patrick Mahomes is 30-19 (.612) in 4QC/GWD opportunities and 76-8 (.905) in all other games (+29.3%).

Carr might be the ultimate “win close, lose big” quarterback in NFL history. But one thing I picked up on early that could help explain his unusual success in crunch time was that he had a lot of high-leverage penalty calls go his way on crucial downs in the fourth quarter and overtime to aid his comebacks and GWDs. I wrote about this in 2021.

Carr led the league in 2014-21 on passes in the fourth quarter on late downs that were negated by penalty in one-score games, and a lot of them were tacky judgment calls like defensive holding or pass interference.

That can help explain a bit why such a passive quarterback can seemingly have such a killer instinct with the game on the line. However, this isn’t to say Carr was overly lucky in his NFL career. For one, this does also attest to the fact that Carr could have had a better record if the Raiders gave him a better defense.

KANSAS CITY, MO - DECEMBER 12: Derek Carr #4 of the Las Vegas Raiders throws a pass during the third quarter against the Kansas City Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium on December 12, 2021 in Kansas City, Missouri.
(Photo by David Eulitt/Getty Images)

But there’s also the fact that in his best overall season in 2016, when Carr led seven comebacks to help the Raiders to a 12-3 record, he broke his leg in the next-to-last game. He missed the Raiders’ wild-card game in Houston, which would have been quite winnable if he had played. Instead, Connor Cook got the start and lost with a bad performance. That could have been Carr’s playoff win.

Carr still received a record deal in 2017 that paid him $25 million per season, which briefly made him the highest-paid player in NFL history. But it’s hard to expect to sustain success like seven GWDs, so the 2017 Raiders were a disappointment as Carr dealt with a little back injury during the season.

Getting Jon Gruden as his coach was good for Carr’s stats in 2018, but the defense was still lousy, and Gruden lost his job in 2021 after personal emails surfaced. Carr joined Jake Delhomme (2003 Panthers) and Tim Tebow (2011 Broncos) as the only quarterbacks to win four overtime games in one season to help the 2021 Raiders make the playoffs.

But in the wild-card loss in Cincinnati, Carr’s chance at a signature touchdown drive in a one-score game ended with him forcing a game-ending interception that was short of the end zone in the closing seconds.

That was Carr’s only playoff start of his career. The 2022 Raiders were a disaster under Josh McDaniels as they blew six fourth-quarter leads that season, and McDaniels benched Carr, effectively ending his tenure with the team.

Carr got what he always wanted in New Orleans in 2023 with a legit defense backing him. However, if you look at why the Saints missed the playoffs on a 9-8 tie-breaker with Green Bay, look no further than the loss in Green Bay. Carr left injured, the Saints blew a 17-0 lead in the fourth quarter, and the Saints missed the go-ahead field goal in the final minute.

Once again, with his best team and a chance to make the playoffs, you can trace an injury to leading to Carr’s downfall as the Saints really needed that win over Green Bay that he couldn’t finish.

Still, it’s a disappointment that he didn’t lead any comeback wins in New Orleans in two years, the only team in the NFL without such a win since 2023.

Then, when you focus on 2024, the Saints were 2-0 with an incredible offense as Carr became the first quarterback in NFL history to lead 15 straight scoring drives, a short-lived record as Jayden Daniels got to 16 (kneeldowns excluded) for Washington. But injuries quickly mounted for the team, and the Saints were soon 2-7 and quickly on their way to irrelevancy for the playoffs.

Then Carr ended the season injured, found his shoulder still hurt significantly in March when he tried to start practicing for the 2025 season, and that’s a wrap on his career.

Carr was never a great quarterback. But he was rarely a bad one after his rookie year. It’s just hard to win in the NFL with someone who is in that “14th to 20th-best quarterback in the league” tier when you don’t have the supporting cast around him, including the right head coach. Carr started his career seeing Dennis Allen get fired in 2014, and Allen was again fired with Carr as his quarterback in New Orleans in 2024.

At the same time, it’s not like Carr was big on elevating the talent around him like a great franchise quarterback can. He was serviceable for a decade, but that shoulder is going to leave him out of service.

Derek Carr, This Is Your Eulogy

Don’t be surprised if Carr follows his brother’s path (again) and takes a media job. Who can forget David Carr ranking his brother amongst the elites? No bias there.

The Manning family they are not. But without another brother (or son) ready to play in the NFL, the Carr bloodline may stop here in the league. As for the Saints, they’ll enjoy about $30 million of relief in cap space from Carr’s decision to retire now. Few teams could use the cap help more, and obviously, the team drafted Tyler Shough in the second round to give new coach Kellen Moore a plan for 2025 and beyond.

To parody the song “Eulogy” by Tool, here is a final goodbye to Derek Carr, 34, NFL quarterback and eyeline wearer.

He had a lot of plays

He had a lot of nothing plays

We’ll miss him

We’ll miss him

We are going to miss him

We are going to miss him

So long
We wish you well
You told us how you’d rather retire than play for anyone but the Raiders
Well then, so long
Don’t cry
Or feel too down
Not all quarterbacks see playoff victories
But at least you tried

Calm down

Rest on your f’n couch

The Saints need the cap space

To pay the next fool martyr

Goodbye

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Photo of Scott Kacsmar Scott Kacsmar12/05/2025 - 10:06 am