vorbis

the amount of people talking about Evero primarily in terms of compensation picks is kinda weird ngl. sure there's a rule that dictates what happens if he stays another year and then leaves for a head coach job down the line, but the football counts more. he's a good coach. he's done good things here already, and nobody will be surprised when he finally gets a head coaching spot. I wouldn't want him to stick around if he doesn't want to, but he has lots of reasons to want to stay. it's a good place for him to be, he IS valued, he's already here, and he will have pretty much total purview over the defense here. anywhere else he goes as a DC, even if he has a good relationship with the head coach, he'll be starting from scratch yet again. he turned down the interim HC opportunity in Denver after Hackett was fired (fair enough), and wasn't offered the interim role here for probably a variety of reasons. reasons totally unrelated to his potential success or failure as a future HC, I would assume. but turning down the interim role, leaving Denver to come to Carolina, and then leaving Carolina again after a year when he has a path to stay, this is not the kind of story that will be an asset to him in HC interviews. even if it's not fair to him, which it probably isn't. he has a lot to gain by continuing to build the defense in Charlotte. the pieces are still all there. when asked why he took the job after not getting the HC job last cycle, he mentioned his relationship with Tepper and the pieces on defense that the Panthers had. nothing about both those things has changed. I know the best way he can show everyone how wrong it was that he was passed over for the HC role two years in a row...

voted Raheem Morris. I think he's kind of the safest bet because he's already had some success as a head coach, then a bit of a unique situation and he lost his gig. he's had a bunch of years to think about what he can do better, and he's still relatively young. everyone speaks highly of him (have for years now), and he can get players' respect. as good a starting point as any. and I imagine he has good contacts throughout the league to build a formidable staff (that will succeed as one, unlike others we could mention).

fact of the matter is, due to the overall dysfunction with the franchise, any stated strategy or plan for dealing with something along the lines of hiring new football leadership is going to be looked at by both fans and by football talking people as the wrong move, or worthy of healthy skepticism. and it will remain this way until the franchise finds some sustained success.

Byrd already has an injury settlement. he's off the roster/IR.

wonder if this means the writing is on the wall to some extent for Brandon Smith. because he seems tailor-made to be competing for a backup LB spot in the middle.

damn

In this period of optimistic offseason puff pieces, I enjoyed this timely catch-up with Tommy Tremble from Mike Kaye. https://www.charlotteobserver.com/sports/nfl/carolina-panthers/article276127776.html it's easy to focus on Tremble's comments about this year vs last year, and god knows there's a lot of material to mine there. but I'm just appreciative that he feels equipped to develop his game under Reich/Brown/Lilly. he definitely has the physical tools to succeed, and now he's hopefully getting the coaching he needs to take his game to the next level.

people should definitely make enormous-scale conclusions about a single play in OTAs I don't think this has ever backfired before honestly

I agree, hella players had to have been involved but... Cook on his current deal is barely even an asset in the NFL trade market. Cousins... it's just not going to move the needle. it doesn't add up IMO. even Justin Jefferson, as good as he is, top 2-3 WR in the entire league, not going to bridge the gap between #1 and #23. and I doubt they'd just throw him in a trade like that after a very successful season.

to get back on the ostensible topic of the thread, something about this Vikings wanting to trade up (to #1??) story is fishy to me. teams can only trade max 3 1st round picks in one deal, if I recall correctly. and they were coming up from what, #23? huh? that's not remotely feasible. we're missing a piece of the puzzle here.

this guy's videos have gotten quite sloppy over the years. this one is pretty surface-level. can't be an expert in every NFL position, I guess. and yes, his voice is annoying. not the end of the world, but combined with getting simple details wrong (Ekwonu was not the 2nd tackle taken last year in the draft, for one), it's just not particularly interesting content.

I think the main concern is just him having the core strength to slip out of tackles in the pocket like he did at Alabama. whether that results in added weight is kind of immaterial. as long as he can maintain the play style he had in college, he should be good to go.

it's obvious the Panthers valued Johnson highly at that point in the draft, and made the move they felt they needed to to get him. the more drafts I watch, the less attached I get to how *I feel* about how the draft is going to play out. I don't watch film of hardly any of these prospects until they're drafted by the Panthers, so I'm not going to pretend I know better than an entire department of professional scouts and "league observers." so to me, a lot of the talk about "he would have been available at $X_pick" is just noise. whether he's "worth" the pick at 80, also, is really only an insightful query relative to the snapshot most people have in their heads of the draft order before the first pick was made. the only thing that matters now is how he plays. I kept looking at this, scratching my head. he had such a weird RAS profile: he was a 2-way player for Oregon in 2021. would practice on offense and on defense. he's been moved around the defense quite a bit during his college football odyssey. that to me says multiple coaching staffs have looked at Johnson and said, here is a great football athlete. let's figure out how to get good results out of these talents and traits. in that sense, the Panthers are only doing what the coaching staffs at Miami U and Oregon also did. he only settled into a role this past season, and his production went up significantly. and this weird-ass RAS profile tells me, here is an explosive mover who doesn't have the refinement right now to perform well in agility drills. so the RAW is real. but so is the underlying physical ability. Dom Capers has a history of finding pass rushing talent, and front-7 talent, in the dustiest corners of the draft and free agency, going back to the early 90s with the Steelers. so with him and Ejiro Evero, I feel like Johnson is set up to have the best chance to carve out a career and a second contract for himself. I'm concerned about the mindset and attitude of a guy who would smack the **** out of a fan who was being a dick on the field after a hard-fought loss in a rivalry game. it just is what it is. maybe the fan deserved to have the **** smacked out of him, but if you're getting caught up in that, maybe you can be manipulated and/or baited on the field by strong-willed opponents. I'm less concerned about him being an unfinished product as an older draftee, given his physical ability, kind of weird path during college football, and the coaching situation he's coming into. I'm also less concerned about the circumstances of the Panthers seeing a run on pass rushers in the 3rd round, and moving up to get a particular guy who was one of the last sitting on a particular tier. that's just tactics of the draft.

it's fun having a GM who is ready and willing to move around during the draft. both because it makes watching the draft more fun and exciting, but also because (to me) it shows a GM who is comfortable with the relative values they put on players, and feels empowered to move around to extract as much roster value out of the draft that they can.

good stuff, thanks for compiling OP.

if I'm running a cognitive test company that works with NFL teams, I'm thinking that tightening up my "information disclosure" policies would be a big part of the viability of my company going forward. plenty of perfectly competent quarterbacks who might feel reluctant to even take this test next year, for worry of the information getting out despite whether or not they feel it's to their benefit.

the shtick with Bob McGinn's prospect rankings (which are VERY thorough and often go against conventional narratives in insightful ways) is that he polls scouts from all over the league, and grants them anonymity. he includes their thoughts verbatim in his rankings, where he puts prospects into tiers. I think most of us can understand how the anonymity approach can be really interesting, but also how it can be weaponized or misused to rapidly change perceptions of a prospect in the week leading up to the draft. maybe the truth is being told, but maybe a team feels like if they can make a prospect slide on draft weekend, they can get a good deal out of it. the thing is, we just don't know which is which, thanks to the anonymity thing.

Bob McGinn has released Wonderlic scores of quarterbacks every year going back to the early 2000s, including many times where he was the first person to reveal said scores. every year some player gets outed as having a bad score and the whispers get louder in the last week before the draft. about as often as not the information is being revealed by Bob McGinn. it's my least favorite thing about his prospect rankings every year. I get why he does it but yes, you should absolutely expect him to leak this kind of stuff. I hate that this is being released right now, and the manner in which it is being done. it smells like a hit job in the days leading up to the draft. just gives me a feeling in the pit of my stomach that someone is being torpedoed. Stroud has the tape of a top pick. for all the talk NFL teams do of "the tape is what's important," they often seem quite happy to have a standardized test to fall back on to make judgments that supersede tape.

insider source tells me that AR absolutely killed it at Kingdom Hearts

the whispers are already deafening that Bryce will be a Panther. not sure today's news of the visit-cancelling changes anything. that being said, I'm so pumped for Bryce Young to be a Panther. I think he's going to be a great one.

being a fan of the team who's going to draft a quarterback #1 in the draft is just about as exciting as it gets as an NFL fan without winning or playing in the super bowl, and I see many fans who are intent on making that into something to be stressed about, and talking themselves into doom scenarios if it doesn't go the way they want to.

I really like the trade down 5-10 spots for maybe another day 2 and day 3 pick option. give Evero lots of bullets to beef up his defense for the playoff push. as for positions, the Panthers have a glaring opening at nickel CB. I know they've talked about Chinn as the big nickel and Rowe has experience there, but Evero's eyes lit up when talking about the importance of the nickel position at his introductory press conference. it's clear they have a high value on that position.

VP of Football Ops is not necessarily a football-centric position (though it may seem so from the title). it could be anything from coordinating travel to managing stadium operations to arranging media appearances, coordinating charity endeavors, etc. it's perfectly reasonable for someone with a long tenure in communications for the Panthers to ascend to that kind of role.

idk anything about these OL prospects but "Steve Avila" is an ass-kicker type name for a lineman.

I'd even go a step further and say that if you're an NFL team at the top of the draft and the difference between Bryce Young and CJ Stroud ends up being that you determine Stroud is not "easy to coach" then to me that's a sign that you didn't do the work you needed to do. there are plenty of differences between these two quarterbacks just in terms of onfield play, more than enough for you to make the determination that's right for your team.