As of midday Tuesday there was no update on the status of New Orleans Saints quarterback Derek Carr, who left Monday's game against Kansas City with an oblique injury in the fourth quarter.
Carr said he suffered the injury on a deep pass attempt for Mason Tipton with 9:38 remaining in the Saints' 26-13 road loss, due to the torque generated by the throw.
Coach Dennis Allen said he likely would know the status in the afternoon or evening.
"Medical people have been going through all the evaluations this morning," Allen said Tuesday, noting that the Saints arrived back in New Orleans at 2:30 a.m. Tuesday. "I would expect that probably sometime (Tuesday afternoon) I'll get a medical update on all these guys, in terms of what happened during the game."
Carr completed 18 of 28 passes for 165 yards and two touchdowns, with an interception, in the game.
He was replaced by Jake Haener, a fourth-round pick last year, who completed two of seven passes for 17 yards, and ran twice for nine yards.
"I thought he went in and did fine," Allen said of Haener. "He was under duress a lot, it got to the point in the game where they were kind of cutting loose on the pass rush. I don't think there were a lot of opportunities for him."
Overall for the Saints, 2-3 and having lost three straight entering Sunday's game against Tampa Bay (3-2) in the Caesars Superdome, it was their worst performance of the season.
"I don't feel like we played our best football," Allen said. "I think we've got to really look at what we're doing moving forward, and we've got to play better than we did on Monday night.
"We played a good football team in a hostile environment, and we didn't fare well in that game. That just tells us that we've still got a lot of work to do, and we're going to be hard at work trying to do that."
Allen said Saints coaches may have to scale back on what they're asking of players.
"When you don't play as well as we needed to – and I thought in this game we made some uncharacteristic mistakes that we hadn't done in the first four weeks – I know that we had a couple of new things defensively that we were doing, I know there's a couple of things offensively that we were doing, and we just didn't execute as well as we needed to," he said.
"So I think as coaches we've got to look at what's our part in that, how can we put our guys in better positions to have success, how can we simplify the thinking for those guys so that they don't have to do a lot of thinking, they can just go out and play. I think that's what we're going to be doing today as we're getting ready to prepare for Tampa Bay this week."
Part of the offensive struggles may have been attributable to offensive line attrition. The Saints have been without starting center Erik McCoy since he left the Philadelphia game Sept. 22 and starting right guard Cesar Ruiz finished against the Eagles but has missed the last two games.
Left guard Lucas Patrick moved to center to finish the Philadelphia game, but against Atlanta moved back to left guard as Shane Lemieux started at center with Landon Young at right guard. After Lemieux injured his ankle against Atlanta and was ruled out against the Chiefs, Patrick went back to center and Nick Saldiveri started at left guard.
When Patrick suffered a collarbone injury during the game against Kansas City, Connor McGovern reported to play center but when Patrick was deemed safe to return to the game, he came back to play left guard and replace Saldiveri, with McGovern finishing the game at center.
"Those guys were in a tough situation," Allen said. "At times I thought we held up pretty good. I thought in protection, in particular, I thought we held up pretty good at least early on in the game. We weren't probably as good as we needed to be later in the game.
"I don't think we got the movement on the line of scrimmage that we needed to be able to get the run game going, so that was a little bit disappointing.
"It's a difficult thing to do, to have that many changes on your offensive line, and yet we've got to figure out ways that we can still move the ball and be effective."
