Up until Saturday morning, when Saints quarterback Derek Carr announced his retirement from the NFL, it seemed as though his would-he or won’t-he shoulder surgery decision was part of a high-stakes game to airlift the underpaid quarterback out of New Orleans and into a cushier job under center for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
And while that still may ultimately be the case—Carr’s statement cited a personal prayer and a discussion with his wife, in addition to the fact that he surrendered $30 million, which would make this a pretty corny chess move—the reality is looking closer to the notion that the New Orleans Saints may have the most meager—on paper—quarterback situation in the league.
No offense to the combination of 2025 second-round pick Tyler Shough, ’24 fifth-round pick Spencer Rattler and ’23 fourth-round pick Jake Haener, but this is a roster that appears primed for the first overall pick next year. And while many will panic, say that New Orleans should have also taken Shedeur Sanders or hit the eject button on future season tickets, Carr’s retirement may end up being the best development that could have happened for the Saints.
New Orleans’s head-scratching, full-steam ahead cap situation has created a team that, since 2020, has been too talented to finish poorly enough to draft a good quarterback on a rookie deal and too old and broken to win meaningful games. As a credit to Carr, he was sort of the perfect representation of a roster full of proud veterans who, while not quite elite, were certainly good enough to annoyingly beat the Giants on a wholly meaningless December Sunday.
I’m not advocating for tanking, but when an opportunity to walk that fine line between openly trying to lose games and putting together an imperfect yet forward-looking roster presents itself, a coach like Kellen Moore should dive in full-speed ahead.
This season in New Orleans can be about pouring every resource into developing a 2024 first-round pick tackle (Taliese Fuaga), a ’25 first-round pick tackle/guard (Kelvin Banks Jr.) and a 2022 first-round pick tackle/guard (Trevor Penning)—not to mention Cesar Ruiz, a 2020 first-round pick guard/center and Erik McCoy, who was one of the best interior offensive lineman in the NFL last season at age 27.
This offensive line can evolve into a sleeping giant while the Saints put themselves in position to acquire a quarterback worthy of a long-term marriage.
The Saints have not picked higher than ninth in the NFL draft since 2008. Even last year, when head coach Dennis Allen was fired during the season, spark plug special teams coordinator Darren Rizzi went at the interim gig like a hungry polar bear viewing it as his one true shot at a full-time NFL coaching job. He won some games the Saints may have lost otherwise. This coming draft will mark two complete decades since the Saints have had a top-three pick (Reggie Bush in '06). This is both an incredible accomplishment and a massive detriment to a roster that has been aggressively mediocre at best; potentially a window into why Sean Payton was eyeing a locale like Miami while he was weighing a faux retirement in New Orleans.
To put it bluntly, the Saints need to bottom out. We need to stop talking about how Payton kinda almost sorta traded up for Patrick Mahomes. We have to stop living in a fantasy world where there’s a bridge quarterback Herculean enough to take this team beyond its absolute ceiling—somehow accidentally winning the NFC South and getting clubbed in the first round of the playoffs.
Yes, losing is painful. Especially if those losses evoke a broader place of sensitivity for a franchise whose fans lived with bags over their heads for so long. But it has to be better than
That’s why Carr’s decision to walk away after the draft, leaving the team in a kind of quarterbacking hellscape where the only aggressive and possible move at this point is trading for Kenny Pickett, will wind up being a blessing in disguise. It’s not the way anyone would have hoped (especially not Moore). It may or may not be part of a larger scheme by Carr to wind up elsewhere. But either way, it forces the Saints to be as bad as the team possibly can be for one season. That may be enough to make the future look far less middling.
