Back then was different. You can't keep a QB of Steve Young's quality on your roster anymore for that length of time as just insurance. Hell, we couldn't even keep Lamont Jordan past his first contract and he was getting in games. Not that Carr is or will ever be Steve Young, but even if he was, it's a different era.
There's a cap bubble now and for the next few years, caused by combination of the new CBA with it's more rapidly expanding cap and old contracts in place, that will allow warehousing of talent for that timeframe. Given the hatchet job that Houston is trying to do on Carr it is not unlikely that he will wind up on an excellent franchise behind the first team QB for a season or two. New England is probably the single most likely spot that he winds up although Philly would be in the running also. The cap is nowhere near as restrictive this season or for the next few going forward as it's been in recent years. Unless of course your franchise made a bunch of stupid high-priced acquisitions of journeymen players this spring.
That's a good point. I could see Carr doing that for backup money anyway because he's never distinguished himself as a starter. Philly would seem a more attractive place, since McNabb gets hurt all the time and Brady never does.
Carr in Philly under Reid and one of the best, YOUNG offensive lines in the league = league-wide ass kicking waiting to happen.
Actually Carr has done very well given the total crap he's been surrounded by during his entire tenure with the Texans. Andre Johnson is a great receiver but there has literally not been another plus player on the Texans offense in their existence. Domanick Davis (now Williams) and Mike Flanagan come closest and they're just competent journeymen. If you look at Carr's record in light of who surrounded him he comes off as better than any expansion QB since Mark Brunell. Everybody else has failed out of town within 4 seasons if they were put at QB on an expansion team. Brunell survived because Tom Coughlin was absolutely vicious about sorting players until he found good ones. That's also why the Jaguars were the best expansion team out of the gate in NFL history. Coughlin gave players 2 seasons tops to prove themselves and then moved them out if they were not playoff caliber.
I always thought the main reason the new expansion teams did well after the cap came in was they didn't have any old mistakes, they had a clean slate. For whatever reason, Houston took Marcus Coleman and Aaron Glenn and their cap numbers off our hands when they first came around. Granted both were Texas guys, but that didn't make sense to me then and in hindsight nothing Houston has done has really worked out.
Houston wanted Ryan Young. That was the whole point of the deal. That Aaron Glenn was a Houston native, a very good player (he singlehandedly beat Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh in a game that season) and a perfect ambassador to the hometown fans made it a plus for them. Basically they were trading cap space for a well-regarded young offensive tackle who looked like he had some potential. The reason that Jacksonville did well right off the bat was that Tom Coughlin was a very good coach and organizer and he had some very good personnel people working with him. I've never understood the Carolina early success and I was not surprised when it all came tumbling down after one very good season. If Houston had had Tom Coughlin instead of Dom Capers I think they'd have done a lot better than they have so far. And you really have to wonder about a franchise that chooses to draft the #3 or 4 talent in the draft with the #1 pick because he's signable. That's just a loser move.
