MasterAwesome

God forbid you dare mention the word "clickbait" in reference to the 27th vague obscure tweet about how an anonymous source heard from their anonymous source's anonymous source that there's possibly a chance that maybe we could perhaps consider trading for Baker sometime between today and 2027...cause that's toxic as hell and I won't stand for it!!!

Not as hot as Jimmy G or Matt Corral though, amirite?? Or is there room for all three in there?

Yeah the real story here IMO is that apparently Christensen looks really good. I guess I’m one of the few people happy about that. The lineup stuff is so fluid at this point in the off-season, so panicking about it is super premature. I swear, the same people losing their minds in here are also the same exact people who were convinced for months leading up to the draft that we were gonna draft Kenny Pickett at 6.

"Get that pathetic 25-year-old geriatric weak-a@# Brady Christensen OFF MUH TEAM!!"

I'd much prefer Icky at LT from the start but as long as the best 5 o-linemen are playing (and presumably Icky at LG in that scenario), I can live with that. Personally I think it's weird and counterproductive to dwell on last year rather than being excited by Christensen being called "one of the best players on the team" when he has largely been an afterthought this offseason, but to each their own I suppose.

A grassroots movement isn't going to change the culture in here. That needs to come from leadership.

Silly me, I clicked this thread thinking it was about how much Corral has been impressing in minicamp to where he's already picking up momentum as the frontrunner to start. But nope, just another Baker thread.

FTFY. If you think Brady was more the solution, that suggests he impressed you, so what did you find impressive about him? We had a huge problem with predictable playcalling and lack of adjustments; not exactly something we can blame Cam Erving for. I think to simply look at our offensive woes on paper and blame Joe Brady for them would be silly and reductive and unfair to him, but I have yet to see anyone do that. The criticisms of him are very pointed and nuanced within the confines of his role on the team. If an offensive coordinator needs a perfectly assembled roster to be successful and doesn't know how to (or won't even attempt to) scheme around his roster limitations, then he's just not very good at his job IMO. If a defensive coordinator had major holes in his defense but chose to spam Cover 2 like he's playing Madden on Rookie mode, even though his defense continues to get gashed over and over again by an offense who routinely finds soft spots in the zone for easy 12-yard completions, I wouldn't say "well ya know...poor guy just didn't have much to work with ". I'd be thinking "DUDE! Try blitzing! Try having your DBs play press! Try to disguise your coverage! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT". That's what watching a Joe Brady offense felt like.

Well he’s the QB Coach of a top 3 superstar QB in Josh Allen, that just might be the cushiest job in the NFL. He’s basically your little brother you give an unplugged PlayStation controller to and say “You’re doing a great job buddy!! Way to go!!!”. If he can’t finesse a halfway decent career out of this? Oof…then “oh wee mayne” as you crazy kids say. Meanwhile Rhule and his coaching staff are in all likelihood out of jobs by the end of the season. I think firing Brady may have actually ended up being the thing that salvaged his NFL career.

The difference is that the people stumping for Darnold in 2021 were blaming his o-line/coaching staff/receiving corps for his failures in NY and clinging onto hope that maybe if those improved, Darnold would improve and maximize his potential. Whereas with Baker, you can't really blame those things because he has had a VERY solid support system across the board in all three of those areas. So we basically know what Baker is, best case scenario, under peak conditions and it's pretty meh. I think pretty much everyone understands that Baker will not be getting peak conditions here lol.

Fatt Rh00L iz SuCK!! Gimme my damn pie!!!

Yeah same, he showed some flashes but was inconsistent (which I’d argue describes Henderson too). I think with Henderson’s athleticism and potential, that if the two of them are neck-and-neck leading up to Week 1, I think they’d be tempted to go with Henderson. So I’m giving him the slight nod over Taylor, but it’s close IMO. I’m just saying, that guy I responded to was like demanding sources from the other guy for simply saying Henderson could “potentially possibly be a starter” which is about the most non-committal take ever lol. I don’t know why calling Henderson a potential possible starter is some kind of preposterous claim.

Don’t worry, I think we all understand your point…it comes up literally every season by somebody. It’s not exactly a unique take. The problem is that no NFL team in reality operates with this kind of mindset. No team goes “well guys…we all know we’re gonna suck this year so we might as well save money, pack it in, and roll with these bums and just try and set ourselves up for a good 2023!!!”. That’s such a casual fan perspective lol. Every team begins the season 0-0 with a clean slate and with the objective to put together a competitive roster for the year. Injuries happen to key players every year and can drastically change the course of a season for any given team, for better or worse. Imagine if Brady got injured in Week 2 and they trot out Kyle Trask who turns out to be a monumental bust. All of a sudden our 5% chance to win the division turns into a 35% chance or w/e. No, I’m not saying we’re banking on a Brady injury to become competitive. There are countless variables and possibilities that inflate or deflate a team’s success in any oven season - that’s just one example (probably the most drastic one, albeit).

Is it really that crazy to imagine CJ Henderson starting for us? I would think the most likely starting CBs are Horn, Jackson, and Henderson. Who else is in contention for a top-3 spot? Maybe Keith Taylor? Rashaan Melvin with a slim outside shot? I would have a hard time believing Henderson isn't the odds-on favor for one of those starting spots.

Here's some pie. Guess you love David Tepper too now. Wow that was easy!

What have we done this offseason to signal we're taking a "young roster-building approach"? Because we drafted a QB? That'd be a strange approach to decide to take in Rhule's third season. Every single team needs productive vets, including developmental ones. Of course Rhule is trying to field a competitive team this year, as every coach does every year. I think there's a certain negative connotation with "win now" mode, which generally implies that a coach is mortgaging the future to capitalize off of a closing window of opportunity (usually involving a roster littered with older vets and/or key players expected to hit FA). I really doubt Dunlap's signing is going to mortgage our future, but we'll have to wait and see the details.

Lol oh well, I tried. Of course they're comparable, with respect to being two completely out-of-left-field, sudden, gigantic, perplexing, significantly impactful moves for Charlotte sports that clearly had a shroud of behind-the-scenes mystique and obfuscation. Can you explain a little more why one warrants a "wait-and-see" approach and the other one warrants a rash and impulsive response? Simply saying "because they're different" is a meaningless rationale. IMO it's pretty clear the difference here is that you're going to always take the position that is least charitable and in direct opposition to Tepper. Which is honestly fine and you can argue that it's justified, given Tepper's failures so far which don't really afford him much charitability when there are a ton of question marks. I'd respect it if you came out and said that outright. But instead, you seem to want to present yourself as this enlightened bastion of objectivity and levelheadedness when I suspect you're just as emotional and biased and reactionary as the average Huddler. Which again, is fine and justified since we're all fans at the end of the day. It takes a lot of discipline to be able to remove your fandom from the equation and evaluate these kinds of things from an objective viewpoint.

I just don’t understand where all this “woah woah let’s all slow down and wait for the full story to come out” energy was when Tepper fired the Charlotte FC coach. You were one of the first reactionaries to jump in and throw some snarky comment in. And then you sat back while everyone carried on for 10 pages of “The Roast of David Tepper”. It was incredibly obvious there was more to that firing behind the scenes but you didn’t seem very interested in that case. At least be consistent. Please spare us both the grandstanding platitudes of “corrupt evil billionaires blah blah” because I don’t have any love for Tepper. I’m just curious what your reasoning is for wildly different approaches to these two stories.

That even raises another question: who gets the bulk of the blame for an overpay? Fitterer or Suleiman? Suleiman is technically in charge of contract negotiations. All these roles kind of blend together and muddy the waters.

It's probably a reasonable assumption to think that the hotter a coach's seat/the shorter his leash, the less authority he has to override the GM if there is a roster disagreement. That probably applies to Fox in 2010 and Rhule in 2022, so again a reasonable assumption to think the GM had more flexibility to steer roster decisions. That's part of the complexity of the coach/GM dynamic, that their individual roles/responsibilities/authorities are somewhat fluid depending on the warmth of their seats. I'm sure Rhule probably had more influence on roster management in his rookie season when Tepper threw his entire support (and wallet) behind Rhule, whereas present day, the power dynamic has probably shifted away from Rhule and more towards Fitterer. Again, it's all speculation though.

Well yeah...my whole point is that it's hard to evaluate them individually when it comes to roster management because you don't really know the power dynamic behind-the-scenes nor do you know which of them is driving any individual move. It's much more straightforward on the other hand, to evaluate them as a pairing, which is what you're talking about. It's like when Ron was the coach and Hurney was the GM and we had some pretty bad drafts and then Ron gets fired and Rhule came in and everyone loved Rhule/Hurney's first draft together (at the time) and people were all "CLEARLY this was Rhule's draft cause it was so much more awesomer than our other Hurney drafts in the previous years!!". But I would argue that the Ron/Hurney partnership needs to be evaluated separately from the Rhule/Hurney partnership, which needs to be evaluated separately from the Rhule/Fitterer partnership. Coach/GM pairings create complex dynamics when it comes to roster management. I'm only talking specifically roster management...there are some things we can probably confidently evaluate them individually on, like game management, which I would give Rhule like a D- on.

Do you guys honestly think Rhule and/or Fitterer are making unilateral decisions when it comes to the roster? A coach/GM relationship should be highly collaborative; otherwise, that's a sign of a highly dysfunctional partnership IMO if they are on wildly different pages on roster moves (FA, extensions, draft, etc.). It's very difficult to evaluate them individually when it comes to roster management.

Agreed. I was simply pushing back on the suggestion that "hey maybe Brady was actually a good OC who was set up to fail and scapegoated because he was stuck with Sam Darnold". Like I said, I think it's silly to hand-wave away Brady's failures simply because he had a terrible starting QB...but similarly, I'm not in any way absolving Sam Darnold's failures by saying he was a victim of a terrible OC. Brady and Darnold were both garbage and it's no mystery how Brady + Darnold + a terrible starting o-line = a joke of an offense.

Chinn and Harper are similar types of old-school SS box safeties. Harper was just as limited in coverage as Chinn. The difference is, Chinn is an absolute athletic freak (10/10 RAS) while Harper was about 73 years old as our starting SS in 2015 and one of the slowest, if not the slowest, safeties in the league. So Harper had zero recovery speed when he did get burned in the secondary.

Yeah but you're doing the whole black-and-white holistic statistical look at the offense which is literally the exact thing I said I am not doing. I'm talking about a nuanced evaluation where you look in depth at why the offense struggled, not just simply that the offense struggled. I'm saying we clearly had a problem with in-game adjustments, which you appear to agree with, which objectively falls on the shoulders of the OC. So simply hand-waving Brady's failures as "oh he had Sam Darnold" is a very surface-level and elementary analysis. We can do a little better than that, as Panthers' fans who watched every game. I think too much is made of the new bum Rhule-lackey who filled in at OC for the last 5 games of the season. People seem to use his failure as vindication of Joe Brady like "See! We still sucked on offense after Brady left, Brady clearly wasn't the problem". We thrust this absolute nobody (Rhule's co-offensive coordinator at Baylor lol) into a prominent role as OC for the last 5 games of the season, while still using Brady's playbook. Properly and extensively coordinating an offense is something that begins in the offseason with playbook development, while using OTAs and minicamp to instill and tweak the offensive scheme. To think some rando lackey could have an actual shot at success going from running backs coach to OC using some other dude's playbook and offensive scheme is laughable. Now that McAdoo has come in and has had a proper offseason to build a playbook and develop/install his offensive scheme...if Sam Darnold starts the year and plays a considerable number of games as our starting QB and our offense crashes and burns similarly to last year, THEN we can maybe begin to consider that as somewhat of a vindication of Joe Brady.