Storybook Season Snapped

Raiders can’t overcome injury to star QB Carr.

- Michael Wagaman

As he lay on the turf of the Oakland Coliseum clutching his right leg as a stunned and disbelieving Raider Nation looked on in eerie silence on Christmas Eve, Derek Carr said the two words no one wanted to hear, two words that diagnosed his injury long before doctors put a hand on him and two words that wound up describing what was a magical season turned suddenly wrong.

“It’s broke,” said Carr immediately after the hit, uttering the phrase over and over as the gravity of the situation began to take hold. “It’s broke. It’s broke. It’s broke. It’s broke.”

What had been a storybook season of redemption for the Raiders quickly turned into a nightmare the moment Carr’s leg snapped. As the team filed into the locker room after the game — a game that ended with Oakland’s 12th victory of the season — there was a palpable feeling of defeat.

The celebratory high-fives and back-slaps that normally come after a team wins had been replaced by an air of resignation, as if the players realized their hopes for a trip to the Super Bowl rode out of the Oakland Coliseum on the cart that whisked Carr off the field after his injury.

It was a feeling that never went away, either. Not the following week in Denver and not the week after that in Houston.

In the two games after Carr’s injury, the Raiders looked more like Mike Tyson trying to get up and awkwardly looking for his mouthpiece after getting knocked down by Buster Douglas. Like Tyson, they never saw the punch of losing their quarterback coming and they never recovered from it.

Not that anyone on the roster or the coaching staff would admit to it. Expectedly, almost everyone insisted that Carr’s injury had nothing, or very little, to do with how the season ended.