By all accounts, Derek Carr picked up Jon Gruden’s offense as quickly as could have been expected. It’s something that Gruden has spoken glowingly about more than once, but Carr says there are facets of Gruden’s system and philosophy that he and his head coach are still working on.
Appearing this week on the ‘Keeping it 300′ podcast with Fallon Smith and former teammate James Jones, Carr elaborated on where his understanding of Gruden’s offense is still a work in progress.
“The biggest challenge [in Gruden’s offense] obviously was at first the plays and learning how to say them and recite them,” Carr said of his fourth new offense in five years. It doesn’t matter who the coach is, there’s sometimes when they call it so fast that you only hear half of it and so you’ve got to just know what he’s calling, you’ve got to memorize it, you’ve got to know the game plan and all those kind of things, so that’s difficult.”
“But we’re at a point now where we’ve hit that stride good. Now it’s just getting on the same page situationally. ‘What do you want me to do in this situation? What check do you want here? What if this is the score, what do you want this check to be?’ And that’s something with coach Del Rio, with him being a defensive coach, it’s a completely different mindset than an offensive coach so it’s just a learning curve that I’m getting used to.”
“We’ve had great communication and great conversation, but this isn’t something that just happens overnight. This is stuff where we have to go through some things and we’re learning and those first three weeks we really learned a lot of lessons. Even last week, situationally, we’re learning each other and I’m learning to make sure to accomplish exactly what he wants done by the quarterback every single game.”
In terms of yards-per-game, the Raiders already have the second ranked offense in the league. This Sunday, they travel to the friendly confines of Los Angeles to face the Chargers 21st-ranked defense.
Maybe (hopefully) a good week to start DC in your fantasy football league?
twitter: @raidersbeat
The NFL man, it changes weekly. Only a handful of QBs have been reliable year after year. Even with his great 2016 season a broken leg and back derailed him. Now, we see how hard it is to get back on track. I’m hoping for the best but there are some talented players and coaches. Not easy to win or even be competitive.