David Carr or the Offensive Line: The Chicken Egg Question

Over the last couple of years, the debate that most Texans fans have become sick of is this one: Was it the Texans offensive line that made David Carr look bad, or did David Carr make the line look worse than it was? Just about all the articles talking about David Carr's move to Carolina mentioned that Carr was sacked 249 times in his 5 years with Houston. What those articles fail to mention is how many of those sacks were not due to the line or parts of protection, but were rather with Carr's fault: mishandling the snap, not throwing the ball away, properly reading defenses, or running out of bounds behind the line of scrimmage.

Texans fans really did have too many opportunities to see what the line looked like without Carr. Backup Sage Rosenfels looked very good in preseason against second team defenses. He almost engineered a come from behind win against the Titans on the road last year after David Carr got benched earlier in the game for repeated sacks and not holding onto the ball. Sage broke his hand during a fluke special teams play during the Jets game, and then was unable to fill in for Carr when Carr struggled for the latter part of the season. During the previous seasons, Carr was never benched even when he was playing poorly, and missed few games due to injuries, so there are not too many examples of what a Carr-less Texans looks like, or how the offensive line would have performed with a different quarterback.

The good folks at Football Outsiders have done their preseason analysis of the AFC South, and make the brief statistical case that it was time for the Carr era to come to an end. It is worth a read, and their comments about the Texans draft are spot on. So, do you have anything to add about this, or are you as sick of talking about it as I am?