Former New Orleans Saints quarterback Derek Carr retired from playing football in 2025, but less than a year later, he is already feeling the itch to make a comeback.
Carr has been linked to the Minnesota Vikings, who struggled with issues under center in 2025, but the former Fresno State Bulldogs star signal-caller also said he’s only willing to play for a Super Bowl contender, provided he’s healthy.
There have been plenty of opinions shared about Carr’s potential NFL comeback. For his former Saints teammate and ex-NFL defensive back, Tyrann Mathieu, he is at the prime age to resume playing quarterback in the league again.
“34 at quarterback is it’s really like an optimal age because it’s like you’ve seen it all. You’ve seen it all, you’ve made all the money,” Mathieu said during a recent episode of the “In The Bayou With Tyrann Mathieu” podcast.
To further stress his point, “Honey Badger” brought up an interesting analogy.
“A QB at 34 is like a hot wife. A safety at 34? That’s a bad guy — that’s a fat cop.”
Quarterbacks tend to have a longer shelf life than most other positions in football, and at 34, Derek Carr’s battle against Father Time is less of a concern than whether his body can hold up for at least one more season in the NFL.
Carr still has his NFL rights owned by the Saints, so a team that’s serious about landing him in 2026 will have to offer a trade to New Orleans first. That doesn’t seem to be a tough ask, as the Saints seem set on moving on with Tyler Shough as their QB1.
In 169 games played in the NFL, Carr put together a 77-92-0 QB record and compiled 41,245 passing yards and 257 touchdowns against 112 interceptions on a 65.1% completion rate.
