While New Orleans Saints fans weren't all that saddened by Derek Carr's decision to retire from the NFL over the offseason, the news itself was a tad bit surprising. Carr was set to make $30 million in 2025 and instead chose to retire, ending his 11-year NFL journey.
Carr appeared on The Dan Patrick Show on Thursday and was asked by Patrick what made him decide to walk away from $30 million.
"Oh my goodness, it wasn't easy, I promise... It's easy to make a comment and just say 'Yeah it it what it is' but it wasn't, it was hard! It was really hard," Carr said. "When I talked to my wife, you know, she was ready for me to be done whenever I was ready... She saw honestly things that no one else saw. You know, waking up on Monday mornings and I can't walk, you know, waking up on Monday mornings and I have to call her to come in the room to help me get out of bed... She was done. You know, 11 years is enough."
Derek Carr finally reveals the painful truth behind his Saints retirement
While Saints fans might have thought Carr's sudden retirement was due to the team drafting Tyler Shough in the second round and expecting Carr to mentor Shough, that wasn't the case. According to Carr himself, it really just sounds like his wife was ready for him to be done with his playing career. It sounds like she was supportive of Carr continuing to play if he wanted to, but, as he said, "11 years is enough".
Carr spent two seasons with the Saints after playing for the Raiders for the first nine years of his career. His time in Las Vegas ended badly with him being benched for the final few games of the Raiders' 2022 season and he signed with the Saints in 2023.
While Carr wasn't atrocious during his time in the black and gold uniforms, he wasn't good either. Sure, the Saints didn't give him the best talent to work with, but he still had talented players surrounding him and the Saints still failed to make the playoffs in either of Carr's two years in the Big Easy.
Carr was slated to miss the entirety of the 2025 season with a shoulder injury, and that also was something Saints fans were irked by. Kellen Moore reportedly took the head coaching job in New Orleans with the expectation that he'd have Carr as his quarterback. That changed rather suddenly with the injury and the retirement and now Moore is stuck with Shough and Spencer Rattler as his two quarterbacks.
It's easy to sum up the Derek Carr/Saints experience as a disaster, but the team should also take a major part of the blame here. They needed to hit the reset button before signing Carr and simply didn't have the salary cap to build a good enough team to help him succeed.