The Raiders suffered one of the most crushing injuries a playoff team has ever seen when Derek Carr went down with a broken leg during Week 16, yet they still have a chance at claiming the AFC’s No. 1 seed.
Oakland did not work out any quarterbacks today, preferring to go with Matt McGloin and rookie Connor Cook for now, Adam Caplan of ESPN.com tweets.
Carr will undergo surgery on Tuesday in Los Angeles, and Schefter tweets the recovery time should be around six to eight weeks. The ESPN.com reporter added (via Twitter) this will be the first instance of a quarterback winning 12 regular-season games and not starting in the team’s first playoff contest since the NFL began the playoff format in 1933. The league began playing 14-game regular seasons in 1961 and moved to 16 in 1978.
A fourth-year pro, McGloin has not started a game since the 2013 season, when he went 1-5 and completed 55 percent of his throws for a much worse Raiders team. The 27-year-old backup — to whom the Raiders extended a second-round RFA tender this offseason — has thrown just 55 passes in the past three years. Cook has been the Raiders’ No. 3 quarterback all season.
Carr, who will enter a contract year in 2017 if he’s not signed to the extension the team is prioritizing, was pondering a miraculous return if the Raiders were to advance to Super Bowl LI behind McGloin. However, Carr’s chances of returning this season are incredibly slim, CSNBayArea.com’s Scott Bair writes.
“He started doing the math in his head, and he said ‘That’s Super Bowl week,'” NFL.com’s David Carr said, via Bair. “As a fan, I’m thinking, do the Raiders have a chance without him? For him, Derek feels so much love for this team, and he really thinks they can go out and [reach the Super Bowl].”
Coupled with the injury issue, the Raiders would have to advance to the league’s February game without the services of a player who was an MVP candidate — and do so potentially without a first-round bye. Oakland winning or Kansas City losing gives the Raiders a bye, but the now-eliminated Broncos beating their division rivals in Denver and the Chiefs topping a reeling Chargers team would send the Raiders to the No. 5 line in the AFC bracket. Illustrating the fluidity of the Raiders’ standing, they can earn the No. 1 seed with a win and a Patriots loss in Miami, which occurred in Week 17 of last season.
Good time to start Cool
Cook*
You either want the Raiders to lose, or know nothing about the team. Cook stinks. McGloin is good. A scrapper. A fierce competitor. He will fight till the final snap. He can take us far with this supporting cast. Cook is years away and likely won’t even make the team next year.
That would be an enormously bad idea. McGloin has experience, is a solid QB, understands the offense; Cook is a rookie, no experience, total unknown (other than being underwhelming in preseason). Cook couldn’t unseat McG for the #2 spot all season, that should tell you why McG is our guy the rest of this season.
I feel bad for Carr and the Raider fans and that is hard to say as a lifelong Hawk fan. I have secretly been rooting for them all season. I like what they have put together the last few years. Even with Bruce going over there. Hopefully he has a full and quick recovery. It is scary good what they have and to be so far under the cap floor. Don’t let that ugly Davis guy screw it up like his senile old man did in his later years. And hopefully they stay in Oakland where they belong. Don’t tell any Hawk fans I wrote this. Lol
As a Colts fan, it made me sick to see what happened to Carr. He’s a damn good QB and it was nice to see the Raiders come back to prominence especially with how bad my team is.
I got say ,it’s been a heck of a season for the Raiders and Raider Nation, I hate the way how Carr’s season ended,but that’s how football is, and that’s our predicament now, Mcgloin has certainly prepared for this situation and so has Connor Cook, and so we go for it, Just Win Baby. I WANT TO ADD….The Raiders should go get a quarterback, any quaterback with just enough experience in postseason to ad live in case Mcgloin goes down too, for we know that opposing teams will try to knock off Mcgloin knowing that if they can do that,it will put the Raiders in a very difficult position to compete at all.