WhoKnows

It really isn’t when you look back at Fitterer’s 3 year stint. We will likely have given up more draft value for Sam Darnold, a guy who was likely released after the draft (to avoid paying 5th year), than we will get back for Burns. When you look back at all the shitty trades/non-trades, draft picks and FA moves, it’s not surprising at all that we fittered up with Burns.

See my post above. Priority is meaningless in this draft. We can’t get Bowers and the Texas TE is not good enough for 33. The rest are day 3 guys. Amazingly our biggest need at WR matches the strength of the draft. Let’s just hope the game changing WR isn’t snagged by the top teams who pick right before us that have WR needs as well.

TE isn’t a priority because there’s basically 1 good TE. TE should have been a priority last year when our top of the 2nd round pick was in great distance to trade up for La Porta or take another TE who will develop. People mention that TE from Texas and he’s not even close to as good as the TEs last year and we’d have to take him at 33. Believe me, if we do that, we’ll be talking about the WR studs we missed. Also, we had Hurst, Tremble, Sullivan and Thomas and they combined for about half the yards as Thielen. Chark and Mingo was very meh and they were 2 and 3 in yards. The TE from Texas isn’t solving that issue. A legitimate WR next to Thielen and Mingo would absolutely have a much bigger impact. I’d love to have a great young TE but unless we find some George Kittle day 3 gem, we missed the giant TE boat last year because Fitterer had some sort of amazing visit with Mingo and reached again.

Dalton isn’t that good. With 2 more wins we’d still be picking 2nd (maybe still 1st as our SOS would be weaker). 3 more wins and we are still 4th. Heck, 4 more wins and we’d still be picking 5th. Dalton is not improving this team to 7-10 or better, not a chance. We still lost the game he played in by 10. You might be forgetting that we won the first overall pick by a landslide and of course Fitt traded it away. The one time that tanking for the top pick went perfectly.

If we don’t draft a WR at 33, I’ll be really disappointed. There’s good OT depth but I don’t see a top guy falling to 33. We could get a WR at 33 that would normally be a mid first pick due to the WR class depth. We have to take advantage of draft value especially when it’s a huge need. We fuged up last year going Mingo instead of TE in a monster deep class.

D Rob looked bad IMHO. The couple drills he did looked really stiff and his explosiveness was non-existent in the 40. Slow time (worst for DEs) and his 10 yard split was slow. Reminds me of Zach Allen and his numbers are similar. Allen went top of the 3rd and has been OK.

If the Panthers don’t exist, Darnold is released after the draft/before 5th year option is guaranteed.

Man, who gave the Bears all that ammo?

What do you believe in? What examples of his player evaluations are awesome? He’s been with the Panthers since 2021 and nothing good has happened draft, trade or FA wise. I don’t care at all that he was a good LB here. I have seen any NFL teams lining up to have Kuechly or TD as their GM. I’ll hope for the best, but there is nothing in the past three years that points to Morgan being a good talent evaluator.

We’ll find out but the negative spin is that Morgan was installed to placate fans as a former beloved Panther and to ensure Young would get more time like Fitt and Tepper wanted. Kind of like we’ll continue the plan but Fitt has to take one for the team. Funny because it doesn’t matter which is true, as long we can draft well. Heck, it doesn’t matter if Morgan was overruled by bad Fitt if we can’t draft well. This isn’t the Bad News Bears movie. If we don’t improve the talent by a lot, we aren’t magically winning anything regardless if Morgan wanted Stroud, Tank Dell and was all for trading Burns to the Rams.

I hear ya. It’s tough to look back the last few years because it has been so bad. It’s hard to get excited when the pressers feel like more of the same. We like Iky at LT. We don’t think Young needs much tweaking and we want to build up around him. If we don’t draft well this year and next year, we are in for completing a full decade of being that worst in the league team. We are 6 years in to a max 7 win team and we are at the lowest point. It’s damn hard not to be tired of this team and get annoyed at the OMG, Morgan wants dawgz woo hoo! crowd. I’ll throw a coin in the well and wish for Morgan/Canales to right the ship quickly. We need a miracle.

It’s almost as if we had finished with the worst record and all our picks and if we had made a trade for additional 1sts this year and in 2025 that we would have been in great position to add a ton of talent to our team. SMH. It just hurts knowing we were given the chance to rebuild quickly and said no, we’d rather do it the hard way.

Ditto. I didn’t like the hire because he’s been Fitterer’s right hand man through some horrible decisions. I was hoping for someone who’s been involved in several solid drafts. Hopefully, he proves us wrong but there was literally nothing you can look at in his assistant GM role here that gives you hope.

You do realize he was a large part of the poo show, right? I don’t know if he can be fixed but the Ily I watched was not even getting a hand on many speed rushers. Not even a hand. No issues with play calling or confusion on who to block or Young or WRs lack of separation, Iky was just plain getting roasted 1 on 1.

You like Sweat better, that’s fine but I still think Burns is considered more valuable. I know I seem to be backtracking on cap but I am willing to burn Dave’s money if we could somehow get a decent pick for Burns. Again, Fitterer has done so poorly drafting and trading that his poo 2021-2023 drafting and his throwing away of 2 of our best 4 draft picks the next two years that our cap space will not be anything close to an issue for at least 5+ years. I hate wasting cap but fug it, I’m in for “buying” draft capital we need far more desperately than extra cap space.

If we still can’t draft with Morgan (I wanted a proven drafter), trading for JJ means nothing. Sorry, but drafting well is the only thing that will change our situation. Drafting poorly means JJ would be a complete waste.

Hill was on a rookie deal but the rest isn’t true at all. Hill’s cap hit was $6M for 2022 and $12M for 2023. They would not have had any issue in the past two SBs affording Hill. McDuffie is the only guy they got on D that contributed. It’s almost silly to say they would have better without Hill considering they had WR issues/drops all year: https://www.si.com/nfl/2023/12/11/chiefs-wide-receivers-emergency-patrick-mahomes-toney The OL is not a mess because they drafted Humphrey and Smith instead of TMJ and a long snapper. The OL has nothing to do with Hill and the improvement on D has very little to do with Hill. I know KC won the SBs but they would have won them with Hill as well and frankly would have been way better this year. They would have dominated with that D and Hill on offense. They won in spite of their WRs being liabilities. It wasn’t like the Chiefs barnstormed their way to the SB win.

Tyreke Hill won one. Honestly, Chiefs made a mistake not just extending him. Orlando Brown did not work out and their lack of WRs has been an issue. They’ve worked around it because they have Mahomes (and a great D this year) but no one would have come close to them this year if they kept Hill. Winning the SB is a bad example though because outside of Mahomes and Brady, there’s barely anyone else. I don’t think Jefferson makes sense because we’d be wasting a lot of resources to get him while Young is here. This is a great WR draft class. We should just do the draft like we should have done and get our young and cheap WRs now. Trade for a Justin Jefferson when we actually need him.

It’s Dave’s money because if you look ahead, we don’t have any worth extending after Brown/Luvu and maybe Burns. You only have to spend 89% of the cap space over 3 years so by the time we actually need it the 2024 cap won’t matter. I’m not saying we won’t waste money as per usual on Hurst and Houston and Sanders, but Burns 2024 tag is meaningless long term because we’ve done such a shitty job drafting that we don’t have worries about can we afford to pay Higgins and Chase while paying Burrow. I have harped on the cap for ages but it just hit me that Fitterer made it a non issue with 3 horrific drafts. Burns was better for 3 years and Sweat was better last year but 2 years younger does play a part. You have risk with Sweat’s age and no risk with Burns’ age for the same deals.

I don’t care about Dave’s money and again that $21M doesn’t matter. After Brown, Luvu and Burns, we have no big contracts coming down the pipeline, especially without our 2024 1st. Before this year when Burns made a business decision, he was absolutely a better pass rusher and more valuable. I still would have taken the Rams deal in a heartbeat. Don’t forget that Burns is also 2 years younger than Sweat as well. Sweat only signed a 4 year extension and he’ll still be 30/31 in his last two years. Burns could sign a 4 year deal and won’t hit 30 until a year after the deal is done. He’s more valuable and I don’t think the league has ever said Sweat was. Sweat’s also has been on more talented DLs overall. I’d still rather have the picks and cap space but I’d take Burns for 4 years all things equal instead of Sweat. Shark move still would have been to trade Burns and use the 2nd to trade for Sweat and still had 2 1sts and $5-10M a year for a FA, but that would require a smart person running the show.

I don’t think NFL people think Sweat is better than Burns. I am 100% all in for trading him (Rams deal was a no brainer except for our dumbass) but I would definitely tag and see if you can get trade bites. We have Brown and Luvu and that’s it for a few more years. Iky and Young aren’t getting big time second contracts. Horn will be lucky to get big money. Our cap space is not going to be an issue for a long time. It’s worth the $21M for one year to try and get better than a late 3rd. We’ll likely blow that money on mediocre offensive spots if we have it to spend.

It isn’t almost always. It’s always. You can’t build a team from FA. It’s not possible. You can augment a good team and make them better but you have to draft well. If we don’t draft well this year and in 2025, the Canales era will be over before it starts.

Oh, I know. I just looked at it and laughed when Hurney took our only good player. The worst part is that even though I like Brown, damn it does suck that we were 1 pick from Herbert. While we’d have screwed up elsewhere having our QB issues resolved in 2020 would have been nice. We spent so much poo on QBs that could have been used elsewhere. I can’t believe I’d ever say this, but Herbert might have saved Hurney’s job to avoid the worst GM ever.

Brown was a Rhule/Hurney pick. There isn’t a single pick in 3 Fitterer drafts where I’d say we want to extend that player on an 2nd deal and that we got plus value for the pick. You could say Hubbard or BC, but they are absolutely replacement level players and a guy like Hubbard is a backup on every team except the idiot team that thought Miles Sanders was worth the biggest RB FA deal.

JFC, I never even thought of it that way but I agree. We could have done nothing and skipped all of our picks and been better off because we’d still have #1 overall, Moore and our 2025 2nd. Heck, we could have gone to any draft board and let it auto draft for us and it would have been way better. Probably would have gotten Jalen Carter and a TE/WR at our two 2nds (assuming Shitterer still trades CMC) not named Mingo.