Evaluating the Saints QB room ahead of 2023 season

The New Orleans Saints seem fully invested in a playoffs or bust campaign in 2023, as evidenced by the offseason moves the team has made.

The signing of long-time Las Vegas Raiders quarterback Derek Carr is the most obvious sign of that commitment. The Saints hope he can be at least a short-term answer as it has never reached the heights it once achieved since the departure of legend Drew Brees.

Here’s a synopsis of the trio that must add up to an overall improvement at football’s most critical position for New Orleans to end a two-year postseason drought:

Derek Carr

Carr has been one of the more polarizing quarterbacks across the NFL landscape in recent years. While he’s more than a certain upgrade over the likes of Jameis Winston and Andy Dalton, just how much he can improve with his second NFL team is a mystery waiting to be solved.

The biggest point of emphasis will be his touchdown-to-interception ratio. Carr finished out the 2022 season with a 60.8% completion rate, 3,522 passing yards, 24 touchdowns and 14 interceptions.

Carr brings many positive aspects of his game to New Orleans. That’s why the Saints were willing to go all-in on him. It is also easy to see why some are skeptical because it does seem that no matter what changes were made around him and just the level of talent he had within the supporting cast, the amount of misfires still were too numrerous in his last of nine season as a Raider.

Only two seasons out of those nine in the NFL have ended for Carr with less than 10 picks. There’s also only two seasons were he led his team to a playoff appearance. The 32-year old will have a chance to prove a change of scenery is all he needs to come close repeating the best efforts we’ve seen from him in a topsy turvy career.

Jameis Winston

Once a highly touted quarterback prospect who has flashed at times, Winston is now merely a backup. Based upon the way things have gone for him in the NFL, it’s hard to see him as anything other than a high-end No. 2 quarterback option

Despite a change in his surroundings and supporting cast multiple times over, Winston hasn’t avoided the turnover bug often. Over the course of what has been an eight-year NFL career to this point, he has completed 61.3% of his passing attempts for 21,840 yards with 139 touchdowns and 96 interceptions. Add 55 fumbles to the ledger, and you have a quarterback that too often loses the trust of his coaches.

In 2022, he completed 73-of-115 passes for 858 yards with four touchdowns and five interceptions mostly while playing injured. He lost his starting spot to Dalton, a journeyman at this point in his career. Despite all of this, Winston has said he is still confident in his ability to be a starting quarterback in the NFL.

“I know that I’m still a starting quarterback in this league,” Winston told reporters this offseason. “But, man, I have to be, like this is all a process. There’s some Hall of Famers that made their big break at 30. So I’m still young, I’m still 29, but right now my role is to serve this team in the role that I’m in. And I’m all-in to doing that.

Winston has the right attitude but the Saints will not give him another chance to prove himself unless Carr cannot stay healthy. It’s up to Winston to prove he is can be ready at the drop of a hat and play smart football if needed. It’s also true there are few more talented backup options currently in the league.

Jake Haener

Haener may just have been the highest value pick of the entire 2023 NFL Draft. With Carr perhaps on the back end of his career as a well-seasoned veteran, the polished rookie could have time to develop into a pleasant surprise for the team as a passer.

A Fresno State product like Carr, Haener flew under the radar for the better part of his college career, not capturing remotely close to the level of attention as a Group of Five standout. That is, until he far and away stole the show at the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Alabama ahead of the draft.

Despite Haener’s high level of maturity, a impressive football IQ, good enough athleticism to improvise when things fall apart around him and the arm talent to fit balls into the tightest of windows, he never found his way into the national conversation the way some other quarterbacks did.

That’s because of the lower-level competition narrative that surrounds conferences like the Mountain West as well as knocks on both his less-than-deal size and age. However, those things never affected some of the NFL’s best quarterbacks to ever take the field, once they took advantage of their opening to play.

As a player who already has an established relationship with Carr, it would not be a surprise to see him exceed the bar set as a fourth round selection and potentially become a viable NFL starter.

“Stetson (Bennett is) about two years older than I am. I’m still 23 and there’s a lot of quarterbacks out there about 23, 24 at this point so age I don’t think is a big deal,” the now 24-year old Haener told me at the Senior Bowl. “And height, it is what it is. I can’t control that and there’s probably a lot of people saying that if I was one or two inches taller that I’d probably be going a lot higher than I’ll go but I can’t control that. I play bigger than I am and do everything that I can in my power to get guys fired up and play at a high level that I’m capable of.”

Haener’s idol Drew Brees was once another so-called undersized prospect. The Saints know that as well as anyone in the league so their new rookie signal-caller will be given every chance to prove he can follow in those golden footsteps in New Orleans. As for 2023, he would be an emergency option at best, even though he’s a promising one.