Mr. Scot

And again, I ask the same question others are asking: How do you judge with Matt Rhule being in charge of the on-field product? I've illustrated by applying it to the players. Is Jeremy Chinn a bad player or is he being put in a bad situation? Using the "fire everybody" approach you're advocating, they only conclusion you can come to is that he's a bad player and we should dump him. Are you prepared to say that?

Which basically means every Sunday is going to be like a three hour dental appointment...

You seriously think there are going to be people upset about Matt Rhule getting fired?

The hard part about predicting when he gets fired is that an awful lot of us can't figure out why he isn't fired already. The question becomes "what the hell does it take?"

Media hype...cool story...dumb people in charge of the Panthers... Put it all together and call it "The Perfect Sh-tstorm"

Ouch

And let Tepper rebuild it from scratch as he sees fit? How much confidence do you have in that actually happening?

I'm not entirely sure about Dorsey either... ...but I can see him getting the job.

Back to this tactic again...which I guess I can't blame you for since your argument was going nowhere. Bottom Line: All indications are that, barring a miracle, Rhule is likely to be fired. No such signs with Fitterer at this point, thus it's reasonable to expect he and Morgan will have input (likely significant input) on who the next head coach will be. Knowing that between them, Fitterer and Morgan have about thirty years of experience and good connections within the league, I'm comfortable with that.

Hell, I've been on that train forever. But given his "nah, me and Marty can handle this" attitude toward the last head coaching search, I'm not exactly optimistic.

And your argument is that it's fair to judge someone who's saddled with an albatross of a head coach. To which I say if it's fair to judge the GM that way, why not the players as well? Heck, since you insist that the GM has made only bad moves, why not just gut the roster too? By your own judgment, Jeremy Chinn is a bad player. Can't have anything to do with how the coaches are using him, after all. And to be clear, you haven't said Fitterer is "unproven". You've argued that he's bad. A judgment you insist can be made independent of the influence of a coach he didn't choose, yet somehow the same standard can't be applied to players which he did. You're applying a pretty significant double standard here.

How exactly does a GM who doesn't have authority over the head coach fire him? (Tepper gave Rhule full control when he hired him)

Except you are... exactly that, whether you mean to or not. The draft picks look bad, but it's got nothing to do with how they're being coached. They just are. The coaching is bad, but that has nothing to do with why the free agents and trades look bad. They just do. See how ridiculous that sounds?

That's a lot of spin to avoid actually defending your argument. Fitterer wasn't one of Tepper's guys. In fact, none of the guys Tepper actually suggested even made it to the second round of interviews. He wasn't one of Rhule's original suggestions either. In fact, he only came along as part of the process after Tepper and Rhule had trouble coming to any sort of consensus on their early candidates. Basically, he was the one guy that the two of them were willing to compromise on. But hey, since you're prepared to fire him as well, are you also prepared to cut guys like Horn, Ickey and others that he drafted? You've said he's a bad drafter, so are we parting ways with the draft picks? For that matter, how about pre Fitterer guys like Jeremy Chinn? He started off great but now is ineffective. Since you don't seem to believe coaching has that much of an impact, it must be Chinn himself, right?

He's got two drafts in the books which include players that I like. Among them Ickey, Horn, Christensen, Tremble and Taylor. It's objectively too soon to truly judge those picks, but I like them so far. We've also got two free agency periods, one without Dan Morgan and one with. The one with Morgan is the one I like a lot better. It netted us guys like Corbett, Ionnaidis and Foreman. Mind you, last year wasn't totally bereft of talent either. We got a guy who looks like a real keeper in Frankie Lulu. Now, are you going to tell me all of those guys are worthless?

Again, are you actually talking about Fitterer or are you strictly talking about me? Because if you're just talking about me you're ducking the argument. I'd add you're the one telling me that we should trust in Tepper to build the whole thing up from scratch. I'm asking you to defend that, but so far you're not even trying.

Yep. I've always watched other teams' games for perspective. Never before do I remember feeling we were so far behind as I do now.

And you saw what happened the last time the owner "hired someone". Keep in mind also this is the same owner who wants to do things differently just so he can show everybody that he's smarter than they are. You really think it's wise to put that guy in charge of our future?

Are you prepared to argue that Matt Rhule might be better without Scott Fitterer? For that matter, other than "well, its all the same" (which is a flatly ridiculous statement) I have yet to hear you give me a good reason why I should trust that David Tepper is going to put the right people in place after we clean house...

Put everything in Tepper's hands and you may as well be rolling the dice.

We're watching a team that's run by a college coach fielding a mostly college staff running college schemes in the pros. Knowing that, I'm no more ready to clean out the personnel department than I am to gut the roster and give up on pics like Jaycee Horn.

Joe Ovies and Joe Giglio of WRAL discuss Matt Rhule's statement that the Panthers are "close"...

Dude, you're not even talking about Fitterer at this point.

As someone who chronicled pretty much every step of the GM search, I can tell you that wasn't how it went.

Not even remotely... He already said the last time they did a GM search that he wasn't going to do that. Tepper also stated it was his desire to bring in a "non-traditional" GM who had a background in analytics rather than personnel. If there's one thing we can thank Matt Rhule for, it's helping us avoid going down that path. But hey, if you guys want to argue that the person who thought the best path to success was to give a big contract and full control to a mid-tier college coach is the right guy to choose our future leadership, I'm willing to listen. Gonna have to be a hell of a sales job though...