Captroop

This is pretty much bang-on my projection as well. I sincerely doubt Bryce is our starter in 2025. I kindly doubt he finishes next season as our starter barring a miracle. 2025 will be when we start to turn things around, and we should be a wildcard contender by '26. This, of course, assumes Tepper continues what appears to be a Scroogian turnaround in terms of his involvement in football decisions. Otherwise, just copy and paste 2023 over and over.

There is one saving grace that he is still only 22. He's literally still growing. Don't get me wrong I don't have any illusions that he'll get more than an inch taller, but he's still filling out. There is one hope, and I was just talking about it this morning, that if he commits himself to weight gain and puts on 30 pounds of mass in the off-season, he could get stronger. Make him marginally harder to tackle, put more power behind his throws. It's a faint hope, but for next season it's all we got.

Keep him. His mediocre season mean he's in a much worse bargaining position. We should sign home for $15-20m and he should be grateful for it.

This season was the worst because the games were literally painful to watch. I care less about wins and losses than being entertained. I wasn't entertained once.

Chuba. He plays like he actually cares.

Stop trying to make pillows and hicky happen

Credit where it's due. This is exactly what many of us were asking for. It's exactly the right call. Anyone taking the opportunity to bitch in this thread is just looking for another opportunity to be a whiny baby poopy pants. I get it, you're mad at Tepper. But we're not getting rid of the owner of the team, so be happy that at least he's taking a step to not unilaterally make the decisions that have hurt the franchise so far in his tenure.

This, I feel, is the ultimate, "I told you so" outcome. I could go back to this time last year and pull hundreds of posts from dozens of posters who were saying the exact same thing: "We need to do everything possible to get a franchise QB. Darnold won't work. Baker won't work. No more retreads. I want to get off the 6 and 7-win roller coaster." Well, what do y'all know. You monkey pawed that wish. We got off all right. We're looking up through 20 feet of dog poo at 6 wins, and are liable to get worse before we get better. Mediocre is the launching pad for a good team. Pushing all your chips into the center and going bust helps no one. Embrace mediocrity, meatheads, because it can always be worse!

I'm fine with it. I'm just relieved the league didn't dock us a draft pick. A financial penalty for Tepper, no matter how small, at least doesn't set the team back further. It would be awful for the fan base to suffer (moreso) for that jackass's actions.

This move would make a lot of sense. As I mentioned in my other post, I think he does a fine job working the phones. I trust him to take a sixth round pick, and somehow turn it into two 5th round picks. But he just simply Can. Not. Evaluate. Talent. Remove the personnel management responsibilities, and I think he's a valuable executive to have in the organization.

I'm not arguing for him to keep his job. I'm arguing for everyone to keep their expectations low if he's replaced.

You have to blame the scouts. Fitterer is making the call on the pick, but he's doing that based on the information he's getting from the people whose job it is to evaluate the talent level of prospects, and their ability to translate to the professional game. I'll say it: I don't have a problem with the wheeling and dealing to be in on every deal and moving picks around. I think that's what Fitterer thinks the job of a GM is, and he does it very well. The problem is that none of the picks we've traded for have panned out. If we'd hit, the CMC trade would look better. Hell, even the trade to #1 would look a lot better if we'd taken Stroud. The problem is we have been consistently wrong on the talent we've been drafting, while much more talented players are being taken after them. We have an enormous talent evaluation problem. And while Fitterer is rightly in the crosshairs, don't expect that issue to be resolved if continue to have the same people with boots on the ground at the pro days and combines, who are watching the footwork, analyzing the BS next-gen metrics, looking at the health reports, and still drafting duds.

Erm, you do remember that the people who would be making that call thought Bryce Young was the best player in the draft, right?

Bryce will not be out QB on 2025. It's not that I don't want him to succeed. It's that I don't want to waste half a decade or more denying what is blatantly obvious. We missed. Badly. And way overspent in doing so. The only thing worse is falling victim to sunk cost fallacy.

Never pick the sire of a former player. Daddy's set financially. He doesn't NEED this.

It was very encouraging to see! However I'm going to wait and see how he performs in the finale and if the confidence and swagger carries over. Remember, Green Bay is the team that made Tommy DeVito look like a future starter and allowed Baker Mayfield to post the first perfect passer rating by a visiting QB in Packers history. Point being, I think this was a much needed get-right game against a poor Packers D that hopefully will bolster Bryce's confidence. But looking at how that D has been performing lately, I'm not ready to say that it's an indication that Bryce has finally turned the corner...yet. Once is an aberration. Twice is the start of a trend.

This. As proven my McCaffrey on the 49ers, a game-changing back is the thing that puts your already great team into a championship quality team. We're not close. If anything what we need is our bruiser. Our Foreman. Our Tolbert. The goal-line, 4th and 1 freight train. Especially since our QB is clearly not the guy you can count on once you get inside the 2 yard line.

He'd probably be among the league's leading rushers if a) we hadn't wasted so much time starting Sanders, and b) we weren't forcing the pass so much early in the season. The later part of this year has proven we actually have a pretty solid run-blocking line, and a quality rushing attack. And next year, Chuba could be a solid fantasy football RB2. He's that reliable. Hubbard has been one of the bright spots this dismal season. He's not only proven himself to be our future every down back, but I've been really impressed by his pass blocking.

Ugh. Well add Washington to the list of Head Coaching vacancies that are FAR more attractive than Carolina. Herbert in LA. Howell in DC. Honestly the only job that may be worse if you're a HC candidate is New England. How do you follow that act?

It's a good thing I didn't suggest he would be taken #1 overall, or even in the first round then, huh?

Put Max Verstappen in an AlphaTauri and he'd be a mediocre driver. Actually that's too generous for us. Put Max Verstappen in a 1998 Taurus. Meanwhile, a pass blocking line and Davante Adams made this guy look like Tom Brady on the 2007 Patriots

I don't think that's true. He has too much talent and had too much success at the college level to go undrafted. He has glaring physical limitations, but someone would take a chance on him; I think in the late second or early third. The range where interesting, talented, but somehow less than ideal players SHOULD be drafted. And there he would be going to a team that: A) was more complete already, presumably had skill position players and a stronger line, and he wasn't counted on to be the franchise savior on his own B) would let him earn his starting job either by winning in camp, or riding the bench a few years and learning the ropes behind a vet. In contrast, because we took him #1 overall, we simply HAD TO name him our week 1 started. That was a given, and probably the worst thing that could have ever happened to Bryce Young I don't have a lot of faith in him to be our franchise star, much less starting QB in a year's time. But I must concede that a competent program would have taken a shot on him before day 3 of the draft, and he'd have been much better off for it.

Likewise, it was the first season I paid attention to football. I can't believe that back then, the only way I could keep up with games was to log onto the NFL website and watch the live drive charts. That's right! I'd spend 3 hours every Sunday staring at a chart on a chunky monitor feverishly refreshing the page, and then leaping in the air like I was in the stadium when I saw they'd scored a touchdown. I'd have the local broadcast on in the background in case they cut away to a big Panthers play. And if I was lucky enough, on NFL Primetime, the Panthers would make Chris Berman's highlight reel, and I'd get to hear him chant, "Daylight come, and you got a Delhomme!" I think I got to actually watch maybe 3 regular season games that year when they were broadcast in the DC area or on primetime. But I watched every post-season game, and I don't know if I ever felt higher highs than riding the edge of my seat the entire Rams OT, followed by the double OT X-Clown. 2015 was special, but my fandom has never matched, nor do I think it could ever match 2003. It's my Red Ryder BB gun. It was the combination of team, my age, the way we'd win games in spectacularly down-to-the-wire fashion, and the complete lack of cynicism I had. I hadn't been beaten down by life and the crushing disappointment of being a long-term Panthers fan. It'll never be the same.

It matters when you're trying to attract not-garbage free agents.

I watched Godzilla: Minus One instead of watching the game. And it was 100% the right call. I got out of the show, turned on the phone, and looked at how my fantasy team was doing. Then I played a mobile game. Checking to see what our score was on a game-day Sunday was maybe the forth or fifth thing on my mind. That says a lot. And when I saw we'd lost 6 to 28, I wasn't even bothered, much less surprised. I've never been so disinterested in Panthers football, and that's really something the eggheads and bean-counters in our FO should be worried about, because I'm sure I'm not alone. Sidenote: Go see Godzilla Minus One. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say I think it's the best movie of the year.