d-dave

Man, I am surprised it doesn't have its own thread.

Just a great damn show.  The cast is wonderful.  Money was well spent.  Waldon Goggins is amazing.

It had a lot of great pieces from the games and toed the line of being definitively a fallout show but still telling an engaging story.  Some of the characters didn't hit for me, but at the end of the day, I couldn't wait to see each episode.  Though I wish it was a weekly thing.  I don't want it to fade from the social conscience.

Season 2 is already green lit!  So I'm pretty excited!  Made be redownload fallout 4 and jump back into the wastelands!

Anyone else?

Looks like a stock trader who wants to know what the fundamentals are and how it's going to grow or how he can capitalize on its weaknesses.

It doesn't work that way in the NFL.  Tepper needs to understand that the NFL isn't a traditional business.  His acumen and background mean NOTHING to winning in the NFL.  Instead, he needs to hire smart people with a plan and let them do their thing with minimal input and interference.

If Tepper wants to be the biggest fan and nerd, getting to go around with the team, attending dinners, whatever.  It's his money.  He wants to talk to draft picks and welcome them?  Cool!  That's a nice gesture for a young man on the biggest night of his life.  But when making decisions, he needs to just back away.  No, run away.

Tepper should concentrate on the business and fan side of things.  Make coming to games an incredible experience for the fans.  Let the football people do the football things.

I'm thrilled for the Canes and the Raleigh area.  I'm glad they managed to put together a competent team and situation.

I think the biggest problem in the NFL is the money.  With the pure amount of money, plus the general ego of the rich in general; you end up with some real special people in charge of teams.  Sometimes you have a cheap billionaire, like the Hunts not wanting to give their players a new locker room.  Or you have a Tepper who will burn money because he's so rich.

I think the most important aspect of owning a team is finding people you trust and giving control to them.  Give them the reign to make decisions, learn, and improve.  That's hard when teams go from the basement to the penthouse in a season (and back down) in sports.  Admitting when you are wrong or don't know something takes a lot of humility. 

That's a difficult task for a billionaire who profited off the hard labor of others without doing much real work on their own.  It's even worse when you have a "self-made" billionaire like Tepper.  They think because they came up from nothing, they can be better than everyone else.  It's exhausting!

Ahh, huddle, you never change!  

What will shut us all up is winning.  That's just the reality of sports.   I hope that the Panthers are better this year than last year.  I hope that this is the coach and staff that helps the Panthers turn the corner from dumpster fire to an interesting and entertaining team.

We are the joke until we prove we're not.  I hope someone puts that on a board somewhere in the Panthers' offseason meeting rooms. 

The good news is that the Panthers have plenty of holes and a dearth of talent!  I don't think you can point to a spot and say "we're set there" outside of guard maybe.  

I'd love to get several of these dawgs on the team to help transform the culture.  It may not lead to a 10 in season this year, but is we're able to reset the roster and attitude...  It won't hurt my feelings.

News Flash, just get DK Metcalf!

This just popped up in my YouTube feed, and I was like WTF?  Bryce's team won the flag football tournament so there's that.  I'm sure many of y'all are going to make the statement "a good place for him" etc.  

But what sticks out to me in the very few parts with Young is if he can find a guy to make a play, he'll find them.  No, this was not NFL football, it was a charity flag football game.  Bryce needs guys who will make plays.  Like most NFL QBs.

While I appreciate the relationship with Bryce that Chark developed, I just didn't see enough production.  The backbreaking drops were the worst thing.  If he would come back on a 1 year min, great, but if I'm DJ, I go somewhere to try to prove I deserve a decent payday.  I'm not sure returning to the scene of the crime that was the 2023 offense is a good idea.

No way, after seeing Canales hug his players, we're going to win the Superb Owl!!!

Jokes aside, I like him doing that to start to build rapport with the team.

We were abysmal last year.  Our D was the bright spot, but even it had some real issues outside of being on the field for most of the game.  We traded away our best edge, lost our best LB, and cut a starting safety.  Yikes.  Our offense, the big brown streak in the underwear of fandom, was just the worst.  Couldn't get out of their way.  When the rare big play happened, something happened immediately after or during to ruin it.  We were worse at scoring than the D&D Club in an 80s RomCom.

I like how we're getting big men in the middle.  I like how Canales seems to have a vision.  I like that they are trying to get Evero some players.

If we somehow manage to double or triple our win total from last year, it's going to be a good year.  Even with that, we need to see Bryce Young develop and show why he was the consensus #1 NFL Draft Pick.  

Let's see development.  Let's see smart plays and game plans.  Since this is the NFL, I would not be surprised if our games in November and December have some meaning for us.  

Got to love how Cam still makes people look stupid, lol.

Yeah, no point in drafting another QB this year.  This is the Bryce Year.  If he can overcome 2023's poo show and show significant growth and improvement; then we might have found our guy!  Conversely, if he poos the bed, then we'll be set up in 2025 to draft the top-end QB.

There's plenty of pressure on Canales and Bryce to get it right.  Adding another young QB to the mix (though several are older than Bryce) will not help Bryce's development.  All eggs are in Bryce's basket for 2024.

Huddle Logic: everyone will be taken before our pick =P  That's what it usually comes to around draft time.

Given the depth of the WR class, please let 5 QBs, 8 WRs, and 5 OTs get taken in the first!  Please!  That would be great for us!

I just listened to the Aaron Duncan video there with Damien Pierce where they were talking about the whole Xavier Legette versus Jonathan Mingo debate.  Interesting to get a sort of dispassionate view of these guys.  The more scouting reports I read about Legette, I'm totally down with drafting him.  I think he opens up a lot of options for Bryce in the short and intermediate areas.

Then again, I have no idea how/what the team is doing.  I'd love to see one of the QBs slide to round two so we could pick up some more picks.  I'm totally down for picking the most impactful player on the board, not just messing around to pick who we think we need.

I just put the game on a few minutes ago.  It's good to see Matt Corral playing.  He's a different QB than Luis Perez, someone I've enjoyed in spring football over the years.

I'm pulling for him because he was always such a nice kid.  Maybe he can make it back to the NFL based on his development.

Again, I have no idea why the NFL doesn't want a developmental league.  It could be so helpful for roster depth.

Honestly, it's all going to depend on the individual dog's temperament.  It goes without saying but all dogs have different personalities.  Labs have been great family dogs for a long time so they probably will end up being great dogs so long as you love on them.

I will say Jaws did it for me.  Thankfully years of Shark Week fixed that by the time I was 15 or so.   But I do get the fear of water.

I do have another fear of open water.  It's more the threat of drowning, being lost, etc.  When I was young, my parents used to send me to Camp Thunderbird where we learned to sail little sail boats, among other things.  It was fine along the shore, but when we got a bit into open water, it was not good.  My partner, an older kid who had spent time sailing in previous summers wanted to really mess with me.  So he sailed us out into the middle of the lake and capsized the boat on purpose.  So here I was, in the middle of Lake Wylie in a life raft with the other kid laughing and chilling.  Yeah, in retrospect this was the early 1990s so safety was just kind of a don't die thing.  I freaked out, swam to the nearest shore and walked back to the camp.  When I showed up after dinner, I got yelled at for walking along the highways around the lake.  Nothing happened to the kid who tipped us over.  Ahh, the 90s...

I'm better about it as an adult, but I am still uncomfortable over large areas of water.

For the actual bridge, it's a tragedy.  Once the investigation comes back to the boat, I wonder how much corporate "profts over safety" we'll see.

Some of y'all are really thinking that Stroud was the norm.  No, CJ Stroud's rookie year was the exception.

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/browns-texans-playoffs-ranking-c-j-strouds-2023-among-best-rookie-qb-seasons-since-2010/

From 2010-2021 there have been 23 QBs selected in the top three rounds of the NFL draft to start 10 or more games.  Why did I stop in 2021?  Well, 2022 and 2023 are still fresh and the returns are interesting.

2022 brought us Kenny Pickett, Desmond Ridder, Malik Willis, and Matt Corral in the top three rounds. 

We are most familiar with 2023, Bryce Young, CJ Stroud, Anthony Richardson, Will Levis, and Hendon Hooker.

That brings us to 28 rookie QBs since 2010 who started 10+ games as a rookie.    Sure, you have those top 8, but after that, it's a crap shoot.  Also, you can look and see that some of these guys peaked at rookies, some had sustained success, others were just meh.

Now let's go back to the Frank Reich era (so long ago).  They wanted to make sure Bryce could call the plays first before they worked on the feet and fundamentals.  That's why late in the season you had the "his footwork is terrible!" stuff come out.  The Reich way was the wrong way.  Would CJ Stroud as been as effective as he was in Carolina?  If you really think that, be careful buying things online...that's all I'll say.

Finally, some of y'all will die on a hill that Bryce Young is not an NFL QB for all of the reasons many of y'all continue to drum beat.  The stark reality is that this is kind of a make it or break it year for him.  If he continues to play poorly, then he'll be gone.  I think Bryce is smart enough to understand that his size outlier gives him less opportunity to show he can be the guy than someone like Sam Darnold, who continues to make good money by looking the part in practice.  If Bryce and the Panthers don't produce more offense (which puts butts in seats), then he will be gone and we'll be looking for a new QB again.

2 minutes ago, CRA said:

Mike Tomlin puts up with plenty of stuff. 

but Mike Tomlin's track record of getting rid of WRs.....is bad news for us.  Wallace, Brown, Holmes, Juju, Chase... Tomlin has almost an uncanny timing to date with that. 

On the flip side, we traded a guy we were going to cut in a few days for an upgrade at WR.  No one is doubting Johnson's ability to play football.  If he sucks, we tried, and we move on with zero down side.

Maybe the trade is a wake up call.  Maybe Canales' style better suits Johnson.  We'll see.  As someone who errs on the side of hopium, I'm going to hope for the best (but not be surprised at the worst!).

Here's where I am, as an idiot with a keyboard.

1. Mike Williams has a perception of being hurt a lot.  Of being on the injury report weekly and playing through injuries.  While that's not out of the norm in the NFL, let's do some basic division and look at a few things versus how much he got.

Average games per season 12.6

Average receptions per game 3.5

Average yards per game 54.6

TDs per season 4.4

Williams contract from the jets:  1 year UPTO $15 million ($8.3m guaranteed, $6.7 incentives)

When you look at it that way, maybe he was asking too much, and the Jets overpaid.  Maybe the Panthers realized that he's too old, too injured, and not a great gamble.

Compare that to DJ Chark: 15 games, 2.3 receptions, 35 yards, 5 TDs on the year. These are the same averages for Williams' career.

Don't get it twisted, Mike Williams is light-years better than DJ Chark.  But is Mike Williams in 2024 three times better of an investment than a journeyman WR at this point?

And heck, it could also be the team didn't like his medicals.  I don't know.  Just an idiot with a keyboard!

I imagine a lot of this happens at the NFL Combine.  

NFL Team: Hey Prospect, we represent NFL Team.  We'd like to talk to you about a future in NFL City.

NFL Prospect: Thanks but no.  I will not play for the dumpster fire that is your NFL Team in your NFL City.

NFL Team: OK, have a nice life (but beware you show up to our stadium!).

If I were an NFL team and some player told me to F off, I'd probably take them off my board.  Then, they probably spread rumors that they are lazy, have bad medicals, etc.

I mean, the reality is that there are only so many jobs to make you an instant millionaire.  While some guys might have the leverage, not all do.  Were I in their shoes, I'd be very hesitant to say I won't play for X simply because the NFL changes so quickly.

He had me at the accent lol.  Not really.

I don't know how to scout for the NFL.  The fact it took a while in college before it clicked can be good (development) or bad (flash in the pan).  Seems like a good kid.

If we do, great, I hope he's successful.  If not, best wishes to him regardless.

2 minutes ago, CRA said:

I mean, this is the part I struggle with.  If Bryce can’t do it with Canales then we somehow did all we could do for him? 

How long of a leash are fans of your opinion going to give Bryce?  What else could we do for Bryce?  Offensive HC, rebuilt the OL, kept Theilen, got one of the best separator WRs, and have more work to do.  If Bryce still looks pensive and shell shocked despite all the systematic changes the Panthers do, then that's on him and he's not the dude.

I think we're putting our best effort out there right now to build a decent offense around him.  At the end of the day the NFL is a QB league, and every QB has to step up.  It's on Bryce.  I'm going to take a good hit of hopium here, and we'll see where the card fall over the season.

What I like to see is when an offense needs a play, a WR can be the dude and make the play.  Like what Smitty was.  I've liked what I've seen and read about Wilson.

23 minutes ago, PootieNunu said:

His NFL tape from last season is some of the worst ever. 

C'mon, worst ever?  Did you see Jamarcus Russel's tape?  Ryan Leaf?

Bryce wasn't good, but the entire team was bad.  Was he the root cause?  No.  The FO believes in Bryce, and they are going all in to try to give him a better situation.  If Bryce can't turn it around with Canales, then he is that great college QB who couldn't cut it in the NFL.

Who is the QB that could have led this offense to a winning record?  What QB could survive a complete poo show of an offensive line?  Maybe Prime Cam or Vick because they could run out of danger.  

I'm not sure I ever want to hear "win the offseason" again after last year =P

Things that I think we ought to do:

1. Continue to look for edge and CB help.

2. Keep looking for depth at all positions

3. The rest is really up to the coaches.

The Draft is a Crapshoot.  Kind of goes without saying =/  Ultimately, it's going to be up to Dave Canales and Evero to make something happen.  I'm excited and hopeful but also realistic.  It would be cool to finally have a winner, but that's a TALL order for this team as bad as we were last year..

Let's see improvement!  I know, that's not a great chant, but I just want to see us get better from last year, and from week to week.

1 hour ago, WhoKnows said:

Sorry, but Fitterer was a horrible GM and I’d put him up for the worst GM ever. What single thing made you think he was a smart football guy?

I'm not saying Fitterer was a good GM, but he was a smart football guy.  How else did he work his way up through the Seattle system during their heyday and get a GM job?  You don't hand that kind of power and authority to a moron like me.  Fitterer's record as a GM was pretty terrible, which makes him a pretty terrible GM.

I have no doubt that Scott is a smart football guy.  I just don't think that Scott has the same leadership traits that Dan has.  Scott's approach of building consensus was great in concept.  It's how a lot of hard things are done.  The main difference is that Scott came in under Rhule, and his only coach he hired blew up in EVERYONE's face.  Scott was trying to make everyone happy.

One thing I'll say about Dan Morgan is that he's well respect in the league.  There's a difference in the inflection when people talk about Dan Morgan respect versus general respect.  For Morgan, it was always a matter of when he became a GM, not an IF.  

Conversely, since Dan was hired, he brought in Dave, and D&D (oh how I love that moniker =P) are aligned (take your shot).  So there is a clear plan in place.  I'm not saying that the 2024 Panthers are going to be world beaters, but they should be MUCH better than 2 wins.  How many actual wins?  4?  6?  Push to 7?  Who knows?  But since D&D are in ALIGNMENT (take your shot), the team will look different, and should ideally work better.

There's my hopium in mid March.  We'll see what happens.  It could all blow up again.  We'll have to see.  I'm excited though.  D&D seem like they have a plan, now let's see what the execution looks like.