Saints quarterback Derek Carr unexpectedly announced his retirement today, citing a degenerative injury to the rotator cuff in his throwing shoulder. The injury had first surfaced in March, and was initially made public by the Saints last month.
Carr, the younger brother of another NFL quarterback David Carr, was a four-time Pro Bowler during his time with the Raiders.
His retirement leave the Saints with three unproven players at the position: Tyler Shough, whom they had drafted in the second round two week ago, second-year player Spencer Rattler, who struggled in six starts last season, and third-year player Jake Haener, who also looked unimpressive in limited duty in 2024.
At least Shough hasn’t won because he was just drafted. He seems like their best hope which is a slim one.
Maybe the Saints should be trying to figure out who is available that can play and has real experience. Maybe try to grab a Kirk Cousins or something. Just someone who can be a mentor if nothing else.
Signing Aaron Rodgers, leaving the Steelers in the lurch, would be pretty darn funny. I don’t know that I’m rooting for that, but I’m not not rooting for that.
The Browns currently have Joe Flacco, Kenny Pickett, and the two rookies they drafted this year (Gabriel and Sanders) as well as injured cap hit nightmare Watson. There’s no way all of them will stay on the roster. Either Flacco or Pickett would be an improvement.
(Maybe they’ll let the Saints have Flacco or Pickett if they also take Watson and his contract.)
I had always assumed that the Chiefs/Eagles Super Bowl rematch would be the opening game of the season. Instead, the word is that the Chiefs will play the Chargers on Friday, September 5, in São Paulo, Brazil.
They tried to make a production out of announcing the announcement of the schedule during the draft. It was cringy. Overhyping what doesn’t need to be hyped has to backfire at some point.
The only video I found has some really bad commentary you can fast forward through.
The fact that the NFL now makes engineered media events out of things like this, milking every possible moment of attention out of its fans, is one of the reasons why my interest in football isn’t what it was in the past.
If we didn’t hang on every little morsel of news, these manufactured announcements wouldn’t be worth the time or effort to produce them. There was a time when the combine was a sparsely attended affair, and now it’s a week long media circus where there are endless debates about hidden meanings or messages even about things like athletes deciding to show up or not.
There may come a time when they go too far, but that has yet to occur. For my part, I don’t pay any attention to most of the nonsense, but I’m clearly in the minority on that.
This drip drip drip schedule release is ridiculous. Wait until tomorrow to find out the mystery opponent the Chargers will play in….Brazil!
It’s obvious the NFL is heading to an 18 game schedule with one game per team played out of the USA.
I’ve yet to see any evidence that they’re actually ‘growing the game’ except for merch sales. The BBC sports app has the Vikings London/Dublin games story buried under about ten other stories.
While the league is probably pretty happy with getting more income via global merch sales, it’s clear that it’s still a niche sport, as far as overall appeal in the UK, despite nearly 40 years of the NFL’s attempts to create a market there, between pre-season games, the World League/NFL Europe, and now playing regular-season games there.
This site shows the results of a 2021-22 survey among UK sports fans; only 13% of them say that they follow American football. Not only is it dwarfed by football (soccer), which is followed by 80%, but it’s also well behind boxing, cricket, rugby, tennis, and motorsports.
There’s been talk for years of moving an NFL team (particularly the Jaguars) to London; maybe actually having a UK team would boost interest some, but at the expense of making an even greater logistical nightmare for teams traveling to and from Europe. That said, the growth in recent years of non-US games, and games on weekdays, demonstrate that the NFL really only cares about the cash, not about the quality of play.
It seems a bit odd to me that they are focused so much on Europe, when Mexico is closer, and it’s fairly popular there. American Football is the second-most popular team sport (after soccer) and third-most popular sport overall (after boxing at second place) in Mexico. They’ve played games down there (which seemed to be received well), but very rarely. (I believe the now-Las Vegas Raiders are especially popular in Mexico.)
I suppose that depends on what part of Mexico. Maybe in places like Tijuana that border California, but my guess is that overall the Dallas Cowboys are probably the most popular NFL team in Mexico. I do agree with you that the focus should be on Mexico and Canada rather than Europe. I just don’t see the game ever taking off to a major degree anywhere outside North America.
The NFL can buy almost anything but they can’t buy a machine to eliminate time zones. It’s 5 hours time difference from the east coast to the U.K. and Ireland and 6 to most of the rest of Europe. With the marquee matchups usually occurring on Sunday nights in the USA, that’s past midnight in Europe.
The issue with Canada, of course, is that there is an existing professional gridiron football league (the CFL), which plays a similar, but not identical, game to NFL football. It appears that the NFL doesn’t want to put the CFL out of business, nor really directly compete against the CFL on an ongoing basis.
Starting in 2012 years ago, the Buffalo Bills began playing regular-season home games in Toronto; Toronto is just across Lake Ontario from Buffalo, and it was felt that Toronto was a natural secondary market for the Bills. Attendance was lower each year that the Bills played in Toronto, and fans back in Buffalo weren’t happy that they were losing a local home game each year, so the experiment was ended.
There’s also the issue that the CFL’s stadiums are small by NFL standards: only the BC Lions and Edmonton Elks play in stadiums with a capacity over 35,000, and the largest current stadium, in Edmonton, only holds 56K; this would be a further disincentive for the NFL to put a home game in a Canadian stadium. The Argonauts used to play at Rogers Centre (a.k.a. Skydome), and that’s where the Bills played when they had games in Toronto, but the Argos moved out of it 10 years ago, and recent renovations to Rogers Centre focused on making it a better baseball venue, which may have had the side effect of making it even less suitable for a football game.
It’s tacky, but it’s easy to ignore. When the full schedule comes out, I’ll make my travel plans and move on. I don’t quite get why people seem triggered by it.
Seems like too many fans are in a mode where they feel compelled to always be consuming everything. As the volume of things coming out grows, they get overwhelmed. But the NFL isn’t super interested in the people who consume everything, those people are already all-in. They are trying to capture those casuals who tune into 10-20% of the non-game content by providing a lot of different types of content in a lot of different forms. Young people (stereotypically) are all-in on social media and like consuming bite sized stories so trickling out the schedule like this is for them. Each “leak” is a post to comment on and share, it’s a conversation. Us old heads like things to be more linear, but this isn’t for us.
