Oakland Raiders: 5 best players entering 2017 NFL season

Wait, Derek Carr is only the fourth best offensive player on the Raiders? Let’s be real. He’s clearly the most valuable player on the team by a ridiculously wide margin. Did you really think Connor Cook was going to win a road game against that ferocious Houston Texans defense in January?

Carr is the present and the future of this team. He is the highest-paid player in the sport and a two-time Pro Bowler that is just getting started in the Silver and Black. However, there are three other players on this Raiders roster that were statistically better in 2016. If Carr is the team’s fourth-best player in terms of analytics, you would take that with how good he is, right?

Pro Football Focus has Carr with an 87.3 grade from a season ago. That makes him the sixth-highest graded quarterback in football. The usual suspects like Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers and last year’s MVP Matt Ryan were ahead of him. Carr even beat out guys like Drew Brees, Ben Roethlisberger and Matthew Stafford. Not too shabby for a third-year quarterback.

While Carr finished fifth in pass grade at 89.0, his run grade, not that it really matters, was flat-out terrible at 39.3. Only Jacoby Brissett was worse. As previously addressed in how Carr uses that Mamba Mentality to his advantage post here at JustBlogBaby.com, he benefited massively from an outstanding offensive line in year three.

Carr may have completed 63.8 percent of his passes, but that was only middle of the pack behind a top-10 offensive line in football. He had way too many drops with a league-worst 37 and a below-average yards per attempt at 7.03.

Transitioning from Bill Musgrave to Todd Downing will tell a lot about how Carr climbs up the quarterbacking hierarchy. Entering 2017, Carr is totally a top-10 quarterback in football. Few would debate that.

However, he has serious room to improve. Fortunately, Carr has an infectious charismatic leadership style that motivates his teammates and a competitive fire that cannot be put out. The future is so ridiculously bright for Carr, but he’s not quite there and y’all already knew that.