In December, whispers emerged that the New Orleans Saints could part ways with quarterback Derek Carr this offseason. However, the club restructured Carr’s contract, indicating that general manager Mickey Loomis and first-year head coach Kellen Moore were committed to him through at least 2025.
That was before a recent report indicated that Carr could miss at least a portion of the upcoming season due to a shoulder injury.
On Tuesday, NFL insider Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk suggested that Carr’s shoulder injury this past season is a big reason he’s still with the team.
“Of his $40M compensation package for 2025,” Florio explained, “Carr had $10M fully guaranteed. Another $30M was guaranteed for injury until the third day of the league year in March, when it converted to a fully guaranteed payment. The Saints could not have cut Carr in order to avoid the $30M obligation if he was unable to pass a physical before the vesting date. …So they did the only thing they could. They exercised their right to convert all but $1.255M of his $40M pay into a guarantee, creating more than $30M in cap space for 2025 and kicking that amount to future years.”
Previous stories from March hinted that the Saints-Carr saga wasn’t over after he made it known in January that he wouldn’t take a pay cut. On March 21, ESPN’s Katherine Terrell mentioned that “Carr was open to looking elsewhere before the Saints restructured his contract.” That’s quite interesting, considering it’s now clear the 34-year-old wasn’t fully healthy at that time.
On Monday, Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated said that “the Saints knew about [Carr’s] shoulder issue” but didn’t “view it as something that was actually threatening his 2025 season” before the April 11 report surfaced.
“The fact that the news of the shoulder injury leaked 13 days before the draft suggests it came not from the team but the player,” Florio added in his story.
Regardless of whether or not the Saints have Aaron Rodgers and/or Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders in their quarterback room when training camp practices get underway, it appears there’s now a realistic chance Carr has taken his last meaningful in-game snap as a member of the organization.
As of Tuesday afternoon, DraftKings Sportsbook listed the Saints as the betting favorites at -110 odds to draft Sanders on April 24.
