d-dave

I hate that it had to happen. But we were absolute garbage when we traded him. He was a major salary cap liability. No one denies that talent he has, and he's really gone to the best possible place for him in SF. They love to run the ball, and put guys in space, and win. He also has a ton of west coast connections with family and friends. I wish we could have kept him, but it would have murdered our cap. I still love watching him make plays. Dude is special, and now he's in a place where the coaches will take advantage of him. I wish him nothing but the best, except when we play. We got a bunch of picks to help us rebuild. It is a very rare win-win for both teams.

The disparity between white coaches and black players has always been huge, and getting more black men (and other minorities) is very important since they make up the majority of the player base. We hired great people and some of them happen to be minorities. That's a win-win. First- we get great coaches who will do a great job. Second- if they get hired off after year 2, we get some picks. Great! But the most important thing is that we get much better coaches. If we have success this year, and we get a lot of our coaches poached, that's a great sign for other assistants. Come to Carolina to get on the fast track to a HC gig. Will help ensure we have high quality coaches, even if they come in for a year or so.

Glad it's not me who has to make this choice. For these guys, this choice will determine the next several years for them. Whew! I hope that if they trade up: we strike gold. I really want that. I have no idea what's going to happen, but maybe getting our character coach guy will move us closer to 55% instead of just 50%.

So it's time for me to hype up my favorite game, time suck, whatever you want to call it! First off, the ViDoc If you've been paying attention to the weekly updates, they've released a ton of information about system changes to D2 under lightfall. Basically, they are trying to again streamline things. From crafting, to UI changes (in game Build Maker!!!) there's a lot of quality stuff coming to D2 in a couple of weeks. This looks like it will be an intense story, part 1 of the finale for the Light and Dark saga. I'm so pumped, and I can't wait to take my crayon eating Titan and punch the witness in the face repeatedly! Strand looks like an amazing ability. It's going to be a nightmare in PVP (good thing I just swore it off after last Iron Banner). I can't wait to play with using strand as a way to hook on to other players and NPCs. The strand punch looks amazing as well. So I'm pretty stoked! I've been super busy with life stuff from work to my dog in the hospital so this is going to be a very welcome distraction! Oh, and because it's a big deal for a potato like me, I solo'd the legendary Seraph Shield. Afterwards, I realized it wasn't that hard. But that's a pretty cool thing for me since I've never been a good player at all.

Mike Kaye was on the Locked on Panthers podcast talking about just such an issue. He was saying that even Richardson could be gone by 5. I laughed. Like really hard. Who in their right mind is going to go all in on Rookies QBs in the top 5? This class??? hahahahaha! Then you think about the general trends in the NFL. If you like a guy, you go get them. Like with what KC and Buffalo did. Like what the 49ers did with Lance (which who knows if they got that right!). Not everyone can fail into the #1 pick. That requires a fair amount of bad luck to be that putrid. Sometimes you have to make some big moves to get the guy who will push you over the hump. I'm not opposed to trading up for the guy the staff thinks they can get the right guy to lead the team for the next 10 years of success. I also don't think everyone is going to be breaking down the doors for these QBs. As we've seen, each pick is risky AF, and more often than not, it comes down to staff just as much as the player. I have no idea what's going to happen. It's going to be an interesting time as we see how the draft landscape changes and what moves the Panthers and other teams make.

As fun as Jackson is to watch, I'm very concerned with his injuries the past two seasons. They cost his team wins. While Jackson is absolutely electric when healthy, he doesn't have the largest frame. And we have seen how even the mold breaking Cam Newton eventually fell apart with injuries. I'd rather gamble on a rookie than tie up our team for half a decade with Jackson.

I think you have to go to the Bill Parcells QB thoughts. https://www.49erswebzone.com/articles/165172-brock-purdy-parcells-rules/ (first hit in google!) https://thedraftnetwork.com/2022-nfl-draft-qb-class-bill-parcells-rules/ (context on KP versus Golden Corral) So there's that. I think if you're drafting a late QB flyer - get them with those traits to have the best shot at hitting on the late round QB. Funny enough, we might see more QBs plucked late hoping to hit on the Brock Purdy jackpot. The reality is that Purdy played well in Shanahan's offense, which is one of the most QB friendly in the entire league. QBs are so incredibly important.

I bet Shanahan is an absolute gold mine of cool information. He's just wired differently, and it applies to football at an incredible level. There's a reason why his OCs tend to become head coaches quickly. Dude is really good at football. The reality is that the Turners were the last good offensive minds we had. They had the experience of Norv and the youth of Scott to craft a really interesting offense. The problem was the timing with Cam's injuries. That sucked. Could have been something really special, ruined by some malicious hits. But Kyle Shanahan is something special. Good for CMC. I have nothing but love for him and wish him well, except when they play us.

Yes it is! Thus far, I'm fairly impressed with it. Aside from a little dust, the card I bought was clean. That's always my biggest worry buying used. Will I end up with something that "looks" the part but doesn't perform. Ran some benchmarks, some games and it's performing within expectations. Today I'm going to see how well it does a water and fluid simulation in Houdini >=)

I did snag another GPU and nothing was damaged! Someone sold me a 1660 for $100, which wasn't bad, put it all together again, and no problems. Posts up like it's fine. GPU also works within spec as ewll. So I dodged a bullet! I even sold the busted GPU for $10 for parts. Cool!

Man, I loved Reddick. He made some great plays for us. The Panthers made other choices in who to pay, whether it was Rhule or Fitterer at the end of the day. Reddick is a great pass rusher and impact player, but as we've seen, he wasn't truly a full time player in that he had to come out. Is it a quibble? Probably, but Frankie has been more than fine. He's not the pass rusher that Reddick is, but he's really coming into his own as a player and I'm thrilled that we have Luvu. Would Reddick have been as impactful this past season? Considering we switched from our hybrid approach to more of a standard 4-3 when Wilks took over - I'm not totally sure. I'm happy for him.

I wouldn't. lol But no, I have nothing. Just my one little system I'm trying to build.

It was, and the room stank of something similar to mineral oil. Nothing else was hot. Getting a cheap gpu to test tomorrow. Thinking that the gpu died, and the futzing with it led to the smoking ruin of that gpu.

OK, so I have been wanting to build a personal PC for a long time, more for gaming and running my more complex renders and simulations (Houdini). I sold some of my junk on good ole' facebook marketplace, made enough cash and got the following: Ryzen 7 1700 ("gently used")- $60 Asus B450 Prime A II (New) - $79 32 gb Corsair LPX DDR-3600 Ram - $72 XFX GTS RX 580 4gb - Had on hand, from a friend. Antec NeoGold 500watt PSU - highly rated by the Power Supply Cultists) A M.2 SSD for the OS and stuff ($30) My slightly older SSD from a junk build I finally get all my parts in, and I'm stoked! I set it all up, do a post check and it works! Get my case, have some fun getting everything in the case, but low and behold - IT WORKS!!!!!! Then I spent a while downloading all my stuff onto the PC, great! Everything is going GREAT for a few days. I ran some benchmarks, and it performs as expected. Cool, this morning, I go to turn it on and NADA. A small click from the PSU (like it did when I started it normally) and NOTHING. No fans, nothing. I don't have any RGB. The board has some amber running lights, but that's it. No flashing, no beeping. Hrm. So I dialed up the guy I bought the CPU from and he was super cool and walked me through the basic trouble shooting. We thought it might be the motherboard. We did the CMOS reset, I tried a different power supply, etc. Nada. Then I took out the GPU - and low and behold - we have action! The case fans ran, the CPU cooler ran (it's AMD with it's little red ring was lit up). But when I put the GPU in and plugged it into my power supply, nothing. After realizing the power switch on the case was not working, I pulled the GPU, swapped the power button with the reset button, a reset the GPU. Plugged it back in. and tried to fire it up. As soon as I powered the computer on BLAM! A loud pop, then the back of the GPU started smoking. It came from the surface like water evaporating from a hot rock. I immediately pulled the cut the power. I pulled the GPU, which didn't show any black marks on the PCI connector, nor in the motherboard. But the smell was bad. I'm curious if not having a good connection with the power and the GPU caused the smoking. It's my understanding that the GPU just wouldn't operate or have a lot of problems if it didn't have enough power. To hope I didn't destroy everything, tried another GPU-less start and it fired up. The little amber running lights on the MB, the red ring on the AMD cooler, and all my fans immediately kicked on. So aside from the horror show that was - what damage do you think I did? I'm pretty sure my GPU is fried. I'm returning the MB since I have some time to do it. What can I do differently? Thoughts? Ideas? Or do you just want to laugh and make fun of me? Ha ha, I won't blame you!

To expand on the idea of "pre-interviewing" DC candidates; I think it was IF we hired a young coach. If we hired a guy, it would be helpful to say "so here's some guys we interviewed, this is what they said; what do you think?" Since Frank has been around a bit, he's got a much better idea of what/who he wants so the previous interviews aren't as useful for him. I don't understand why everyone is making such a big deal about the DC interviews. It's the FO's (Tepper's) dime, it gathers information, and that's it. Listening to podcasts, videos, and reading here (not finishing because it gets repetitive) to hand wringing over interviewing these DCs before we had a coach is just silly. Believe it or not, our team is run by NFL guys. We do have a meddlesome owner, but so do many teams. I think the team wanted to try to help a young coach because they thought for sure they'd get one. It turns out they didn't, and the gas and time of the FO folks was wasted, and countless keystrokes across the internet. Let Frank find his coach, everything else that happened before is water under the bridge at this point.

This has usually been the case with Playoff Coordinators, especially the deeper they go into the playoffs. I'm sure Steichen would love to get one of the 32 HC jobs in the NFL, but he's got to prepare for a big game. If he blows that game, does it hurt his credibility to be a good HC? It's a double edged sword. As far as The Roar, I like it. Do I agree with John and Billy all the time? No. I appreciate their insight, and it's a nice listen on the way to work. Ultimately, they are just 21st century journalists trying to make a living doing something they love. More power to them.

Ahh, the cap. Where we always say "We have no cap room!" Or "The Saints have a billion in dead cap!" Then FA proceeds to happen per usual... Good times!

You had me at bickering and eating paste! Love it!

For all the well earned poo thrown at Tepper, apparently even Sean Payton was impressed. Jeff Duncan, long time saints beat reporter in New Orleans said that he's heard from Payton and his camp that they left the Panthers very impressed with Tepper and the organization. That Payton actually liked the job opportunity, but knew the Saints trade tax would be an issue, and acknowledged that the idea of Payton's Legacy in NO was a problem for him. Benjamin Allbright is another well connected source with some words about the Panthers coaching prognosis, and again, it's not all bad. Sure, we have challenges, but that's why we're a top 10 pick, and are looking for a coach. We have a deep pocketed owner, there are a LOT of good football minds in the FO, and while many of y'all are ready to crucify Fitterer on his front lawn, he's respected in the NFL. Back to the issues of Steichen - there are a lot of reasons that he could have had a bad interview. Could be that he's just too busy with his current job and wants that ring. Could be he didn't mesh/gel with Fitterer and Tepper. We weren't there. You don't hire a coach who isn't ready to be a head coach. The fact of the matter is we don't know enough as fans. So you either have to trust the FO (which is hard), and wait to see how the season unfolds. I really liked the idea of Steichen, but it looks like that's not going to happen. Hopefully the Panthers make the right choice of HC and QB and we have have some success. Life is more fun when the Panthers win.

Honestly, we just have to see what happens. The doldrums of the offseason. While it's fine to pretend we're all some expert armchair GMs around here, the reality is that none of us know jack poo about building a successful NFL team. We might know a lot about things they don't know about. I'm pretty sure my knowledge of D&D rules for the past 30 years is WAY more than the Panthers FO, but it doesn't make me more knowledgeable than a NFL GM. I was fine with the CMC trade. We couldn't win with him. It's no loss there. There were reports that GB offered a 1 for DJ. How legit were those rumors? Same with Burns. There's a lot of agent smoke that goes out to these NFL insiders. Or teams could be floating some of these to see what traction there might be. What does it mean when the trade doesn't occur? That it wasn't going to happen. Again, there's a lot of spin in the NFL news cycle since everyone's an expert and insider. So does Fitterer deserve to be fired? I don't know. I don't think Dave is going to pull that trigger this season considering the investment in Fitterer retooling the entire scouting department. Fitterer is going to have a chance to pick his coach and his QB. We'll see what happens from there.

I don't see a really good reason to fire Fitterer right now. Like @kungfoodude said: We need to give him a chance with complete control as opposed to playing second fiddle to a used car salesman. Now, if he bungles this off season, then there you go.

What's the incentive to move on from Lance? Here's the thing about Purdy - does he look good because he's actually a quality NFL player? Is he the next Tom Brady style story? Or does he happen to be in the best system in the NFL? As we have seen, coaching matters. Scheming matters. The player is almost the least of the variable. I think they will probably keep Lance next year and let him and Purdy battle it out. If Lance looks good but loses out to a better Purdy, then they might get more from that. They are both on rookie contracts so there's more incentive to see if Purdy is the real deal or if Lance's light finally clicks on and he can stay healthy.

Unless a show either hits the jackpot, or it gets canceled by the end of the first season. That seems to be what Netflix does. Or it also makes tons of cheap, shitty shows. I really liked 1899. The look and feel was amazing. Getting into the mind bending stuff was cool. I hate it will never get the treatment it deserves. Same with Warrior Nun, a fun show.

You're pretty much stuck with a crop as most prints work on that 4:3 ratio. If you're OK using a custom print settings, you can do that at home. I don't know of many places that will do a 16:9 print. Here's a good thread that has some ideas on how to do that: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3041428

I played it a long time ago and loved it. I was super excited for the show, as I am over most nerdy things! It blew me away. So good! Familiar with the game but being a true adaptation as opposed to a retelling. The atmosphere was so good. even my wife who lives by HGTV and stupid fiancé crap was enthralled. Can’t wait to see more!