Why Derek Carr gave reason for hope in Sunday’s loss

The Oakland Raiders lost to Dallas on Sunday Nigh Football but despite the loss, there are reasons to be positive after the game if you’re an Oakland fan. No, the Raiders are not going to make the playoffs and no, they have not fixed the many problems plaguing this team. But when you watched the game, there was one thing in particular that should make you feel at least a little bit better moving forward into 2018 and that’s the mentality of Derek Carr.

For the first time since week two this season, we saw Derek Carr having fun. I know that may sound like an odd thing to focus, but not if you believe like I do, that Derek Carr’s mentality has been a major issue this season.

This is hands down Carr’s worst season of his career. He’s been skittish in the pocket, inaccurate and has made a ton of bad decisions. There are lots of theories on why it is that Carr has regressed this season, but to me it seems pretty obvious. After suffering a broken leg and a broken back, he was played scared. He was seeing ghosts in the pocket, feeling pressure that wasn’t there and as a result, he made bad decisions with the ball. He would get rid of the ball too quickly, often times making ill advised passes that resulted in picks or near picks.

And when there was real pressure, not just ghosts in Carr’s head, he would often simply crumble and take a sack rather than getting out of the pocket to extend the play. But on Sunday, in the second half in particular, that changed and in a big way. Carr started using his legs and that seemed to free his mind.

Carr was extending plays with his legs, scrambling for yards and in general, played with a fearlessness that we haven’t seen much this season at all.

Many fans were upset by his decision to dive for the pylon at the end of the game, a play that resulted in a fumble and caused the Raiders a win. But while that may not have been the wisest decision, it was a decision made based on fearlessness not fear, and that is significant.

Carr has always been the kind of guy who will make mistakes because he’s going 100 miles an hour. We’ve seen it in the form of trying to stiff arm a defender on a scramble, we’ve even seen him to a flip while scrambling. We’ve seen him throw ill advised passes, even ones that have turned into interceptions because he trusted his arm far more than he should have. Those are all mistakes that you have to live with when it comes to Derek Carr. There’s a reason he was compared to Brett Favre. Not because he has already become a great player like Favre, but because he is willing to push the envelope with his play the way Favre would.

If Derek Carr is your quarterback, those are the kinds of mistakes you have to live with, and you have lived with ever since he entered the league. But this season, most of his mistakes came from the exact opposite mentality. Rather than making mistakes based on overconfidence, he’s been making mistakes based on a lack of confidence. A lack of confidence in his offensive line, a lack of confidence in his health and a lack of confidence in his own abilities.

But on Sunday, we saw Carr playing with confidence. We saw him having fun and doing things that we haven’t seen most of the year. Sure, we saw him make mistakes, but there were the 100 mile an hour mistakes that you expect from Carr rather than the timid mistakes of a rattled quarterback.

It wasn’t a great game for Carr by any means. It wasn’t even one of his best games this season. But it was a game where we saw Derek Carr being Derek Carr for the first time in a long time. Hopefully, he continues to play loose and we will see a return to the confident play maker who flirted with an MVP title in 2016 as the team heads into the 2018 season.