Derek Carr Says He Would Sign 1-Day Contract with Raiders, Still Hasn’t Signed Retirement Papers
Derek Carr is the Raiders’ all-time leader in career passing yards (35,222) and touchdown passes (217), but his time with the organization came to an awkward end in 2022 after Josh McDaniels’ first season in Las Vegas.
After leaving the Raiders, Carr signed with the Saints as a free agent in March of 2023 and played two seasons in New Orleans before announcing his retirement.
Carr’s awkward end with the Raiders has caused some to wonder if he would want to someday sign a one-day contract and retire as a Raider. Carr offered an answer to that question this week on his podcast.
“I would love to sign a one-day contract. I would love to do that with the Raiders,” Carr said on his Home Grown podcast. “I just don’t know how all that stuff works with me being under contract with the Saints and all that. We haven’t gotten to that point and so and David [Carr] keeps getting on me because I haven’t signed retirement papers.”
Carr has talked about remaining in contact with Raiders’ owner Mark Davis, so it wasn’t a surprise that he would be happy to retire as a member of the organization. The more interesting detail he shared, though, was the matter of his retirement papers.
The only reason not to sign retirement papers after you are “retired” would be with the thought in mind to potentially play again.
As Carr pointed out, he is technically still a member of the Saints and if he woke up tomorrow wanting to return to the NFL, he is contractually obligated to the Saints.
Earlier this year, former Raiders’ GM Mike Mayock and talked about the legacy Carr left behind in his NFL career and said the Raiders let him down during his nine years with the team.
“When you start to judge Derek, did he have some shortcomings? Sure, he did. Was he a Hall of Fame quarterback? No, he’s not. But he played 11 years at a high level. He was a natural thrower of the football. Really good in the pocket. Very accurate,” Mayock said on Sirius XM Radio.
“I just felt bad for Derek because with the Raiders he had several changes in general managers, head coaches [and] coordinators. He met every single one of them with ‘Ok, how do we get better?’ Instead of any kind of negative perception, he did the best with what he had. I don’t think he always had the support cast that would have benefitted him and given him more playoff games and wins.”
For the three years Carr and Mayock were together with the Raiders, there was no shortage of trade rumors around the veteran quarterback. In fact, those trade rumors were the storylines that kept a few offseasons interesting in Oakland and Las Vegas.
Publicly, Mayock and Jon Gruden sometimes seemed to leave the door open on the possibility of trading Carr, but we know now that Gruden and Mayock weren’t interested in replacing Carr with Tom Brady.
By most accounts, it was owner Mark Davis that was enamored with the idea of signing Brady, but Gruden wasn’t on board.
“I worked to put a deal together for Brady and Gronk to come to the Raiders,” UFC president Dana White said three years ago. “It was almost a done deal, and at the last minute, Gruden blew the deal up and said he didn’t want them. All hell broke loose. It was crazy. Brady was already looking at houses. So Las Vegas would have had Brady and Gronk the year the Bucs won the Super Bowl, except Gruden blew the deal up.”
x: @raidersbeat
