Quarterback Derek Carr has been a free agent for a week. The market for unrestricted free agents opens in less than three weeks.
Time, as they say, is a-wastin’.
Carr’s brother, David, said Monday on NFL Network that Derek nevertheless plans to take his time.
“It’s gonna be a long process,” David Carr said, via NFL.com. “He wants to do his due diligence and see as many places as he can to get a feel for what the best place for him will be.”
That’s fine, but his head start on the rest of the market is going to quickly evaporate, especially with the Scouting Combine (a/k/a Tampering Central) just a week away. That’s when teams and agent of impending free agents begin to talk serious turkey.
The problem for Carr is that interested teams already know that there will be other options, via free agency or trade. Those options, as a practical matter, already exist. (Indeed, the tampering already has begun.)
And so for the same reason Carr is taking his time, other teams are taking their time, too. With an unprecedented game of quarterback musical chairs about to get rolling, the fact that the music started a little early for Carr doesn’t really matter all that much.
The challenge for every quarterback, Carr included, will be to do the right deal at the right time. Teams looking for quarterbacks will move on to Plan B and so on, and the overall money in the budget also will evaporate, quickly.
