Nevius: Mystery of QB success playing out in Bay Area

Was there ever a debate about who is the most important player on a football field? If so, it was ridiculous. Obviously, it’s the QB.

Which makes it strange that no one has any idea how to find one.

Not that people aren’t trying. The bright guys with the stopwatches will tell us, based on height-to-arm-length ratio (or something equally random), which guy will turn out to be a franchise quarterback. And then a Russell Wilson shows up and blows the metrics all kerflooey.

Consider the Bay Area. We have the yin and the yang of quarterbacks - the Raiders’ Derek Carr and the 49ers’ Nick Mullens. Which would you pick?

In this corner, in Silver and Black and wearing a “dagnabbit” grin, we have Carr. He’s a three-time Pro Bowl performer and, at $124 million, was, for a time, the highest-paid player in professional football.

Or do you go with the unknown, undrafted and unappreciated free agent Mullens, who is single-handedly bringing back the Opie haircut? Too small, no rocket arm, so nobody wasted a draft pick on him.

Which one? Dumb question. Obviously, Mullens. He’s having a bit of a moment.

Recently Ryan Leaf - a notorious first-round washout from the 1998 draft - said he knew after his third game he wasn’t going to make it in the NFL.

Mullens appears to have taken the opposite view. Working under the charming assumption that life is fair and everyone gets their opportunity, he’s been preparing for this manically.

If nothing else, he looks like a quarterback. As 49ers fullback Kyle Juszczyk says, Mullens hangs in there and steps into his throws. Something it didn’t seem (says the guy on the couch) that C.J. Beathard was doing. Under heat, Beathard seemed flat-footed and made arm-only throws.

So it is Mullens’ world and we’re just living in it.

As for Carr and the Raiders, we are officially one more hissy fit from a melodrama. Who’s the latest angry man on the roster? And can that person play? Because hothead malcontents who are without skills are just taking up space.

We can get to Carr’s play in a moment, but his cryptic announcement to reporters last week about how “something happened” in the locker room was not helpful. And saying “it kinda bothered me,” but “I’m not going to tell you” what it was is right out of fifth grade.

That’s only adding to the idea that the locker room is divided and fractious. Just dumb.

That said, I remain a Carr fan. He sails just enough of those easy, deep, on-target throws to make me believe he can still do it. And yes, that makes all the short, underneath passes more frustrating.

No need to form a team of investigators to locate the problem. Carr is getting knocked down. Regularly and violently. We are at 28 official sacks now, going into Week 11. The all-time high for Carr for the 16-game season is 32.

He doesn’t like it. Few do. It has affected him. He’s getting rid of the ball before there’s actual pressure and he turtles up rather than scrambling. And the next thing you know the TV cameras catch you making a face and you have to deny that you are crying.

I’d say two things. Quarterbacks are not that easy to come by. As much as fans want to draft the next big thing out of college and get rid of Carr, they should check the stats for one of last year’s can’t-miss rookies, Sam Darnold, taken third in the draft.

Darnold has 14 interceptions and 11 touchdowns for the Jets. That’s not to say he won’t work out, but it takes some time.

As Kyle Shanahan said the other day, fewer than 10 QBs get drafted each year. A Men’s Journal story said over a 10-year period, 40 percent of the first-round quarterbacks flopped.

So if you have QB1, and he has gotten it done before on the field - and Carr has - you cut him some slack. I’d advocate sticking with him and hope to improve his protection.

However, he’s got to cut out the locker room drama. And on the field, he’s got to make some deep throws, even if it means absorbing shots. If he can’t do, that there are real doubts his future.

The funny thing is, Carr is having a good statistical year. If it held to the end of the year, Carr’s completion rate of 71 percent would be a career high. That’s the problem with statistics. They only tell some of the story.

More and more, it seems playing quarterback is less about getting caught up in the minutiae and more about the weird collection of DNA that creates the 12 good ones in the world.

Not that they are identified right away, either. Before the 2016 draft, there was quite a fuss over the size of the hands of Cal quarterback Jared Goff. It seemed Goff’s hand, measured thumb to pinky, was only nine inches. NFL teams preferred 9?” to 9¼”.

It was quite the hullabaloo. Right up until Goff staged his pro day at Berkeley, and using one of those special Cal rulers, measured 9?.

He was taken No. 1 in the draft and this year is being mentioned among MVP candidates.

I’ll bet no one has asked him about his hand size in years.

Contact C.W. Nevius at cw.nevius@pressdemocrat.com. Twitter: @cwnevius