On the same day that Raiders coach Jon Gruden took a backhanded shot at quarterback Derek Carr, Carr provided an arms-wide-open assessment of the man who previously ran the Oakland offense.
“He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever been around when it comes to analytics numbers and percentages and things like that,’' Carr said Wednesday regarding Broncos offensive coordinator Bill Musgrave, via 9News.com. “He’s one of the smartest people that I’ve ever been around.’'
New Broncos quarterback Case Keenum agrees.
“Bill is as smart as they come,’’ Keenum said Wednesday. “He’s brilliant and I really appreciate his knowledge of the game and how he explains, installs and teaches us the game. . . . He does a great job of teaching us the game and he sees it through a quarterback’s eyes, which I really like, having a coordinator who played at quarterback and knows what we’re going through.”
Musgrave, as the photo attached to this post reveals, indeed played quarterback at the NFL level. Gruden did not.
The Raiders fired Musgrave after a 2016 season that resulted in the team’s first postseason appearance since 2002. The fact that his replacement, Todd Downing, couldn’t deliver in 2017 helped set the stage for Gruden’s return.
Musgrave now gets a chance to match wits with Gruden. And if the man whom Carr regards as one of the smartest he has ever been around wins, Carr may end up getting called out, again, for whatever it is that Gruden thinks Carr should have done differently.