Mr. Scot

I think I'd forgotten that Theilin, Johnson and Legette play for us

A pickup of 24... That's possible?

When you have a quarterback who's more "vertical" than 5'9

Dalton looks good, but the question is how long is he going to look good He's definitely not any sort of long-term answer, but he could be an effective stopgap.

What year?

Lady Cowboy Fan and I adopted two more parrots and bought new cages for our entire flock. Let's just say I'm tired

Okay so I'm apparently on the wrong channel. What I'm watching right now beers no resemblance to the Panthers offense I've seen in weeks past

Irsay is lousy when he's sober, worse when he's drunk or high. Johnson succeeded at a time when there was no salary cap and benefited a lot from the stupidity of the Minnesota GM who agreed to the Herschel Walker deal. He went to Miami with pretty much full control and never got close to that level again. As to Reich not pushing back though, that part I agree with. Some guys just don't do that...even when they should.

We bought new bird cages for our entire block, so I've spent the weekend up to this afternoon cleaning the bird room, putting together new cages and trying to get things arranged. I'm not sure I sat down much at all yesterday, so it's nice to be able to watch some football.

That sentence was physically painful to read

Likely... Three including us, if I remember correctly. I know there was a story that he was being offered the Cardinals job. We figured at the time that took him out of the running for us, but that fell apart or something. As to him not coaching now, he said at the time he took the Panthers job that this was his last go round and he was retiring once it was over. His children and grandchildren all live in this area so the plan was always to stop coaching and just be a family man. Granted, he likely didn't expect his tenure here to be so short but I doubt that changed his mind.

Disagree, especially when you look back at his first two seasons. Now, the attempt to "fix" Carson Wentz was a mistake, and even Reich himself admits that. After that, you had the debacle of Matt Ryan which led to Jim Irsay interfering in football decisions and everything going downhill after that. Then, as others have discussed before, he escapes the shadow of Jim Irsay...and lands with David Tepper, basically the equivalent of getting away from Jeffrey Dahmer only to be captured by Ed Gein. There are definitely coaching decisions I disagree with (the skill set thing being the biggest) but I'd still say it's pretty hard to be settled either way on Reich given the circumstances.

I was of the belief that he needed more time to recover from Rhule for a while, but learning two things changed my mind: The first, and most definitive, was finding out he had been one of the people talking behind Reich's back. That's just unacceptable. The other though was hearing that once he joined the Panthers, he went heavily into analytics based draft evaluations rather than traditional scouting. Word is that was a point of difference with Dan Morgan also. Morgan prefers eye tests to spreadsheets.

I'll look for it (not in a position to right now) but someone else posted it here within the last week also.

Yep. I feel like with everything that was happening, the 2023 Panthers we're going to be an absolute disaster. You had Fitterer with full roster control (and per stories, a willingness to undermine his head coach in an effort to save his own ass) pretty much selling the farm to get Bryce Young, which put us where we are now. Then throw in David Tepper, who has of last year still believed that his involvement in football operations was a positive. As of this year, he says that's over. We'll see. So yeah, it was gonna be awful. The only question is which head coach would have taken the fall for it.

See above... Fitterer was thoroughly sold on Young and had final say. The only way for him not to be the choice was if Tepper overruled it, and there's zero indication that he was inclined to do so.

I don't know that you necessarily have to involve Tepper. It's pretty well known that Scott Fitterer wanted Young. And since he had final say on draft and roster decisions, yhat's who we were going to get unless Tepper stepped in and overruled him on Reich's behalf. Based on the way Tepper talked about Young after their interview dinner, it's highly unlikely there was any chance of that happening.

Schefter and others reported him wanting Stroud. I think the whole truth is most likely that if Reich had final say, he'd have taken Stroud. For all intents and purposes though, Reich was third (maybe even fourth) in the chain of command. Reich also isn't a muckraker, so most likely when it became clear that the organization was going with Young, he went along, publicly said all the right things and just hoped for the best. The full behind the scenes story will likely never be known because Reich isn't the type to tell all. While I respect that, I know I'm not alone in wishing that he would.

Not sold on the first point, at least not in the Xs and Os and the actual football stuff. On the broader front, Reich probably needed to push back harder against both of his owners in some areas. That's on him.

Any coach we hired still would have had Tepper as owner, Young as quarterback, etc. etc. So you really see anyone who could have succeeded in that scenario?

That still would have been better than what we ended up with, though. How much better is debatable, but it's hard to say it could have been worse.

Same thing though. That requires believing that Jim Irsay made a good decision.

I'd say several of them probably are. Now that said, it's also possible he should have fought back in some of those areas harder than he did.

Honestly, I see little difference between judging a coach working under David Tepper ans judging an offensive player with Bryce Young as his QB.