The Jacksonville Jaguars weren’t exactly shaking in their galoshes at this week’s matchup against Derek Carr.
Jaguars safety Rayshawn Jenkins made some ruthless comments about the veteran quarterback Carr following Jacksonville’s Week 7 win over Carr’s New Orleans Saints. Jenkins indicated that all Jacksonville had to do in order to neutralize Carr was to keep everything in front of them.
“We know that’s Derek Carr’s game,” said Jenkins, per John Sigler of USA Today. “He’s gonna checkdown, checkdown, checkdown. We just have to win the game down the field, and that was the mindset of the DBs.
“We’ll let him have the check-downs,” Jenkins added. “We’ll come up, rally, tackle that, and get rid of the shot plays.”
Jenkins probably isn’t wrong here as Carr has been criticized throughout his career for falling back on more conservative pass attempts instead of taking deep shots. The Saints have been encouraging the ex-Pro Bowler to air it out downfield in his first season with them, but Carr isn’t really proving capable of it. He is averaging only 6.3 yards per attempt this year (the lowest since his rookie season) and has just one completion of 50 yards or more over seven games.
That was the story of Thursday’s game against Jenkins and the Jaguars too. Carr, though he threw for 301 yards, needed 55 pass attempts to do so and didn’t have a single completion longer than 21 yards. But it is probably not a Carr-specific problem as the 3-4 Saints are in complete disarray on offense right now.
