CamTheMan

I can’t imagine watching these games and having the complete lack of critical thinking skills to think the quarterback is the reason for the ineptitude. Holy poo. This isn’t even a defense of darnold lmao we obviously need to upgrade sooner rather than later but there is absolutely nothing open and he’s getting pressured as he gets the ball. Both of these teams are awful

He didn’t quit, he’s stuck between two jobs because the defense was very predictable and the offense was repeatedly attacking the vulnerabilities of the defensive scheme.

I’d hesitate to blame any of this on defensive backs. We were in cover 3 a whole lot, the exact opposite of what you want to do against Brady and the opposite of what Arizona did the week before. Why that passing concept worked repeatedly and why it isn’t the corner’s fault for giving it up: playing soft cover 3 leaves the flat wide open and the buccaneers took advantage often with the slot or TE doing quick outs. Doing so left that outside corner as the primary tackler for many of these plays. If you watch it back, you’ll notice them setting up the deep shot by repeatedly throwing under Evans, using the fade as the clear out. Our refusal to adjust to this left our corners in a constant dilemma. If he hesitates for a second, he gets beat over the top by an all pro WR and the greatest quarterback ever. If he stays with the receiver, the receiver in the flats has a huge gain after the catch. It was just horrible game planning with even worse adjustments. It was embarrassing.

Fair, I took my frustration with the game and some of the general excuse making for Wilks out on you. My apologies. Wilks has done admirably and I have a lot of respect for how quickly he turned our culture around. I’m just extremely tired of being terrible. Being average isn’t really ideal either and I think that’d be our ceiling with Wilks. I want the organization to stride for better than what I believe he’s capable of.

The defensive coordinator calling the exact same play every single play is his first choice at DC and was the guy he brought to Arizona. You’re lying to yourself if you think he’s the guy to turn this team around. I honestly get it though, we’ve seen utter trash for so long that fans are okay with us continuing to suck but with a local guy who at least embraces our culture. Just don’t pretend he actually knows what he’s doing.

Na, I was really hoping he’d be good because I love the culture that he brings. Unfortunately him and his staff have absolutely no clue what they’re doing in relation to the actual game of football, which is a pretty key aspect of being a FOOTBALL coach

If you blame the corners, you have absolutely no idea what you’re looking at. They are running cover 3 literally every fuggin play and Tampa was just dumping it into the flat and putting the deep 3rd DB in conflict. They had no shot in fuggin hell at defending that, you could put prime Revis out there and he’d get destroyed. This was possibly the worst coached defensive game I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Wilks damn near lost all excuse for an interview and Holcomb should be canned tomorrow for how god awful this was

Please stop with this narrative that the AFC is way better than the NFC. It only exists because the AFC has better offenses and media darling quarterbacks. They haven't had a positive record against the NFC since 2018 and this year they are only 34-32 against the NFC. The NFC has won 3 out of the last 5 Superbowls and 8 out of the last 15 Superbowls. There is nothing, at all, to suggest that the AFC is any better than the NFC. The most recent winner of the AFC had a run heavy offense and a great defense. The top seed in the NFC this year has a run heavy offense (albeit due to their quarterback) and a great defense. When our team was good, we had a run heavy offense and a great defense. This may completely shatter everyone's minds because if goes against the popular narrative now, but you don't have to throw it 50 times a game to be successful. Controlling the ball, winning the turnover battle, and converting on key downs/in the redzone have been the keys to success in the entire history of the league. They still are and will always be. Our current team is built to run the ball and play great defense. That is the identity of the Carolina Panthers and the NFC in general. Teams who copy other formulas for success and completely abandon their own never work out well. Quarterbacks matter, and if there is one that fits what we want to do when we pick in the first round, we should take him. However, blindly taking quarterbacks in the first round because your team sucks is a horrible strategy.

Getting the vibe that most people disrespecting him as an executive don't actually pay attention to the league outside of this team. This was his 20th season working in the NFL and he has been on 3 losing teams (Tampa Bay from 2013-2015). In that time they drafted multiple pro bowlers and doubled their win total, until he got poached by the Titans. In his time in Tennessee, they never had a losing season and had a combined record of 66-43 (60%), good for 9th best in the league during that span. He made some mistakes and lost a power struggle within the organization, so it was probably a good time to move on. With that said, he successfully rebuilt them, he has a good reputation around the league, and he has had more success than any executive that we have had. He'd be an upgrade imo

One of the most important qualities in a quarterback is their ability to lead a team and have a respected voice in the locker room. The great ones are THE leader of their team and the guy that the team looks to when games get tough. With that said, I don't know how anyone can expect Will Levis to command an NFL locker room when he PROUDLY puts mayonnaise in his coffee. That alone was enough to remove him completely from my draft board. Intangibles matter.

He only got pressured a handful of times and he made horrible decisions almost every single one of them. It is quite literally impossible to keep him in a clean pocket for an entire game, having him layup interceptions to defenders every time he faces pressure is not acceptable and there is no excuse for it. So according to you, we trusted him in the first game against the Falcons but not this past one? We lost the one we trusted him in and won the one we did not trust him in? Look man, I get that PJ is the most exciting quarterback we've had here for a while and it is at least a fun switch up from the regular dysfunction at the position, but they have every reason not to trust him. He has double the interceptions compared to touchdowns and has a habit of throwing passes straight to defenders' hands. Our only chances at winning games is to get our run game going, limit turnovers, and get stops on defense. Leaning on PJ Walker to win you games in the NFL is just not going to work.

Wilks wasn't even allowed to pick most of his staff in Arizona, nor given any power to make personnel decisions. No idea if he's a good head coach or not (especially considering he was just an average coordinator here), but that year in Arizona was such a terrible situation that I don't think that should really be used against him

It isn’t the 1960s, none of these are even remotely as important to quarterback evaluation as talent and traits. It’s hard to find any prospects at all who fit any of that criteria and none of those concerns are worrying going into the NFL anymore lmao

From an organizational standpoint, purposefully losing games is a great way to instill a losing culture and make your team undesirable to coaches and players. I don’t think purposefully losing should never be considered a reasonable plan. With that said, there is a middle ground between losing on purpose and sacrificing your future to win meaningless games. Once your chances of the playoffs are essentially over, the best thing to do imo is to put in some younger players to develop them and see what you have going into the offseason while still actually trying to win games

PJ Walker and Baker were both here for all of training camp but Baker has gotten all the reps, so PJ definitely doesn't know the offense better. As for Baker, he played 4 seasons before this and was never even close to being this terrible. We've gone through 4 QBs in 3 years who have all looked so inept that we felt the need to replace them immediately even though they've all (except for Darnold) had success before or after playing for us. Hard to judge our talent with this coaching staff being among the worst in the history of the sport.

I’d want Chris Tabor to be interim HC. I think if Rhule is fired Snow goes with him, so Wilks would probably need to focus his time on the defense and fixing them. I think the team is talented but I think it’s too late to salvage the season. I love the offseason and part of me wants us to suck and get a great pick but above all i just want us to field a team that doesnt make me hate football lmao

I don’t know if any of that is true but I do know that many people on here were raising some of those concerns before the offseason even started. If Snow and the defense wants to play small and fast on the edges of the defensive line I honestly don’t care enough to complain about it, but why the fugg did we put the #8 overall pick pass rushing defensive tackle into the 1-T? Why the fugg did the coaches and FO not bring in a real 1-T after watching Brown and our defense struggle to play the run last season? The personnel decisions and putting players in horrible positions to succeed are an even worse offense than anything with the scheme imo

I’m gonna call bull on some of the offensive line grades. Corbett was pretty good outside of the one play he got Baker killed, which completely tanked his grade for some reason. Meanwhile Michael Jordan was out there getting wrecked against their backups as well as their starters. He should be fighting for a roster spot, no idea how he’s starting still. Him and Elflein are clearly terrible and are significant downgrades over the guys on our bench that were presumably brought in to start (Icky, Bozeman).

Na, the difference between us is that you will watch something once live and believe you know everything and I’ll watch it multiple times and use stats to help me understand it further, and I still will say I have more I need to understand. You’ll sit there and say everyone, including quantitative statistics, is wrong.. while you know what REALLY happened. You’ve said multiple things that objectively made zero sense at all, the worst being that our defense was bad to start games and couldn’t defend the run early. That’s already been disproved easily and is obviously wrong to anyone who actually watched the game, but you’ll sit there and die on your hill rather than just simple admit you were wrong about something. It happens, move on.

I watched every game as well, some multiple times unfortunately. Since we disagree, stats help us look at what objectively happened. Wins and losses is a team stat dependent on so many factors. We won 5 games and had chances in many more even though we had the worst offense in the league and a below average special teams. We would have had a top 3 pick if our defense was also below average. Points allowed is a basic stat, just as yards allowed is a basic stat. Neither of them tell the whole story. Hence why we should look at efficiency stats rather than the most basic stats possible. It’s becoming increasingly obvious you don’t actually care about having a debate and would rather just say “I watched the games so I win.” You won’t change your mind no matter what evidence is presented to you lol

Do you not see the irony in you saying this in a thread YOU made about a random team stat, which you blamed entirely on the defense...? If you need to resort to some kind of out there, specifically chosen stat in order to prove that someone ISN'T good... ...they are.

This entire thread that you created is based on a stat you found to discredit our defense. People reply back with stats disproving you, and you go on about how stats don't matter and how watching the games matter. I also watched every game, sometimes multiple times to look at specific players and schematics. I disagree with your opinion, therefor the logical conclusion would be to look to stats and quantitative data to find out if they confirm or deny our surface level observations. You holding onto your own subjective beliefs in the face of overwhelming data disproving it is worrying on a macrolevel and I'd say is the main contributor to the problem we face today where people can't disagree about anything without it devolving.

Responding any more after this would be a waste of time so I'll end it with this. Firstly, we allowed under 4 yards per carry the entire first half of games, which would be top 3 in the NFL. That is what I would consider as early on. Our second half yards per carry was 4.3, which would have still been in the top half of the league. We were 6th in net yards per pass attempt. We were 11th and 12th in hurry rate and knockdown rate, respectively. 8th in pressure rate. 9th in sack percentage. 11th in expected points contributed by passing defense and 8th in expected points contributed by rushing defense. We were 4th in yards per play. We were 15th in points per drive, even considering we had the worst starting position in the league. Our average starting position was a whole 2 yards farther than 2nd worst, and 7.5 yards farther upfield than the team in first. 5 yards farther than average. We had the 2nd most defensive drives in the league. Let me throw out stats for a second and use basic logic since you hate statistics. Our quarterback was worst in the league. Our offensive line was bottom 3 in the league. Our WR2 had one of the most inefficient seasons from any WR in decades. We fired one college offensive coordinator and replaced him with another college coordinator halfway through the season. We turned the ball over at one of the highest rates in the league. We had no run game offensively. We had a terrible special teams. Yet we won 5 games and competed in many more, as your original stat suggested. How in the world did we possibly do that if our defense was average or even below average, like you're suggesting. Oh, but none of these objective statistics mean anything. You, a random poster on an internet thread, is more reliable than hundreds of metrics that will disagree with you. We should stop relying on stats and instead rely on what? What exactly should we rely on other than quantitative data to form opinions?

Bottom 3 offense*

Nobody has said we are the second best defense in the league. Literally nobody has ever said that. What we are saying is that it’s laughable to try and convince anyone this was an “average at best” defense. They were 15th in points allowed per drive, which is their worst ranking in any stat and can easily be explained by the fact we were DEAD LAST in starting field position. Why are you people ignoring that and the fact our defense faced extreme high volume since our offense was so terrible. This isn’t rocket science. Above average defense + Bottom 3 defense = Good efficiency stats and below average total volume stats