As Saints drive onward, they owe us a Carr report

No, I don’t mean they should completely change how they adjudge defensive ends (although they definitely should do that). And I don’t mean they must follow my own draft preferences. Instead, the one area Saints clearly owe more to their fans is in transparency about injuries. The latest, obvious case in point is the mysterious shoulder ailment of putative starting quarterback Derek Carr.

Before getting too deep into the transparency argument, please allow a disclaimer: This isn’t an anti-Saints-in-general column. I love the Saints, not just on the field but off. Owner Gayle Benson is a charitable dynamo. The Saints encourage their players to be beneficially active in the community, and they tend to choose players with the character to embrace those community engagements. And the Saints tend to reinvest in Louisiana and, in general, to be good (albeit somewhat demanding) corporate citizens.

Finally, of course, they are our Saints. They are an indelible part of us. (If you know what I mean, you really know what I mean.) We cannot not love them.

Yet still, they drive us crazy. They make wacky trade-ups in the draft for boom-or-bust players who too often go bust. They insist coaches are good when we can all see they aren’t. They repeatedly insist their roster is better than it is and blame injuries for poor team performance — without seeming to look inward to figure why the Saints for so many consecutive years have had among the most games lost to injuries in the league.

Which brings us back to the team’s consistent lack of transparency about injuries, especially as highlighted by Carr’s situation. Nearly two full weeks ago, April 11, reports emerged saying Carr has a shoulder ailment so bad he might miss the whole season. Since then, the Saints have told us nothing. Not a single substantive thing about the status of the quarterback on whom $150 million is being lavished….. [The full column is here.]