– Outsports Celebrating Derek Carr's embrace of an openly gay teammate

It's all but certain that Derek Carr's nine-year tenure as quarterback of the Las Vegas Raiders is coming to an end after Carr wrote a farewell column for Raiders fans three weeks after being replaced. As LGBTQ sports fans, we will always fondly remember Carr for his treatment of an openly gay teammate.

When then-Raiders lineman Carl Nassib came out as gay in the summer of 2021, his teammate Carr spoke several times about supporting Nassib, although he said he wasn't sure how everyone on the team felt.

“He’s our brother,” Carr said on Cris Collinsworth’s podcast in July 2021. “So if you want to mess with him, you have to go through us.”

That's exactly the kind of sentiment Nassib needed to hear from someone like Carr, who was the face of the franchise.

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“At first I was shocked because I didn’t know,” Carr told Michael Smith and Michael Holley on the “Brothers From Another” podcast. “No – he never spoke to any of his teammates about it. His moment was when he grabbed his phone and did it this way (on Instagram). And I called him. He was training so I texted him. And he immediately texted back. And he said, “Derek, you have no idea how much it meant to me that you reached out.” He said, “I was hoping you would reach out.” I'll let his words be his words, but I wanted him to know.”

Some of Carr's references to Nassib's homosexuality as a “lifestyle” display ignorance, but the sum total of his comments in several interviews strikes the right note.

“Our team was committed to supporting him,” Carr told Collinsworth. “That doesn’t mean everyone agrees or agrees with the lifestyle.”

“But we live in a country today where people think that if you don't agree with each other, you can't love each other and have each other's backs. And that is probably the furthest thing from the truth. And so some people asked one or two questions. But they all say without a doubt that we are behind him.”

An NFL roster consists of 53 players from diverse backgrounds and many with strong Christian beliefs (some from denominations that may have preached against homosexuality from the pulpit). So it was no surprise that Nassib would be as welcome as he was.

Nassib played the 2021 season for the Raiders, which culminated in the team's first playoff appearance since 2016. His homosexuality wasn't a story – in a good sense – and we have people like Carr to thank for that. He helped set the tone that Nassib was his teammate and that was it. Even though his language is imperfect, Carr is what an ally should look like.

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This story originally ran in January 2023.