Oakland Raiders Can’t Succeed Without Derek Carr

The Oakland Raiders and its fan base held their collective breath when news of starting quarterback Derek Carr’s right ring finger injury broke about a week and a half ago. And while it looks fairly minor per Josh Alper of Pro Football Talk, the thought of Carr potentially missing any practices or games had to freak a lot of people out. Carr is the unquestioned leader of the offense coming into his sophomore season, a season that holds a ton of hope for the Raider faithful.

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While it now looking good for Carr to be at training camp as a full participant, the news of the injury has to give any fan who bleeds silver and black some pause in terms of what the Raiders would look like without Carr for an extended period of time in 2015. While Oakland has done a fairly good job of giving Carr both weapons and depth on offense, one thing they are not built for is for someone else to take the reins under center for more than a short time.

Oakland brought in unrestricted free agent Christian Ponder after an underwhelming 4 years in Minnesota, where he never lived up to his 12th overall selection that many at the time called a reach pick. Matt McGloin returns to the team and is a serviceable backup for the most part, but he showed a few seasons back he isn’t ready to be a successful starter for more than a game or two. Other than that, Oakland signed Cody Fajardo out of Nevada as a college FA and can’t expect much from him this year, if he makes the team that is.

Ponder would be the likely starter if Carr were to miss any significant time, and one look at his Minnesota playing career should be enough for any fan of the Raiders to hope that Carr is the last Raider player to get injured. Ponder has spent most of his career turning the ball over; if you combine interceptions and fumbles lost, he is averaging just under two turnovers for every game he has played in, per Pro-Football-Reference.com.

While some of that can possibly be attributed to the teams that Ponder played with, many of those mistakes were from poor decisions and faulty coverage reading. Putting him on the field against the rest of AFC West is a scary thought; all three of the Raiders division opponents finished in the top ten in total passing defense in 2014, with the Chiefs and Chargers both finishing in the top five.

Ponder has spent most of his career turning the ball over; if you combine interceptions and fumbles lost, he is averaging just under two turnovers for every game he has played in, per Pro-Football-Reference.com.

While it is obvious the Raiders don’t want to see anyone other than Carr running the offense in 2015, they’d hate for a team with this much potential go to waste due to poor quarterbacking. And while most teams in the NFL would experience a significant drop-off from the starting QB to the backup, the Raiders might have one of the biggest.

It would be a shame to see Oakland start the season 5-3 or even 4-4 and have Carr miss more than a few games this season. Not only would that obviously stunt Carr’s growth, it would almost certainly kill the Raiders chances at making it back to the playoffs for the first time in 12 years. Raider nation is not just hungry for the postseason, they are practically starving at this point. Carr must stay on the field for Oakland to do the same after the regular season.

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