hepcat

Legette’s ceiling is Devin Funchess. He won’t be on the roster in two years.

There was a moment during the Falcons game they ended up winning in OT where I thought Canales might end up being in trouble. But they turned it around. Penix getting hurt might have saved the Panthers season. Cousins was rusty coming back cold. He was absolute money against the Bucs last Thursday.

Hahahaha did you suddenly forget how miserable the last 6.5 seasons were? If he could just go back in time, not hire Matt Rhule, and hire literally any NFL caliber head coach, even a BAD NFL head coach, I think many many things would be better.

You don’t go losing to the butthole Saints twice and get a victory Monday.

Dan Morgan earned his job this offseason. Best draft class in probably 10 years.

The NFL is an entertainment product. The games being fixed, or moreso nudged towards preferred outcomes, doesn’t change the fact that NFL football is still entertaining.

Absolutely not. Go out and pound Seattle into dust and get some playoff caliber energy. If the Bucs take a dump and lose to the Dolphins then it’s all wrapped up by Week 18.

Benching Icky was a wise choice based on the referee crew assignment. Shawn Smith’s crew had a heavy tendency to call false starts on the home team. I have a feeling the Panthers are using AI analytics for game planning, for better or for worse. This was one of the “gotchas” that came up in the AI analysis of the game taking into account the ref assignment.

I have done some research into this subject. Clete Blakeman’s crew called the most penalties in the NFL in 2024. When Blakeman is assigned, the outcome becomes high-variance. The sheer volume of penalties means the referees have an outsized impact on the result. This is ideal for "trap games" where the league might want to introduce chaos into a matchup that looks like a guaranteed blowout on paper. The assignment makes perfect sense in hindsight for a usually high powered Chiefs offense going against the lowly Titans. But in the end the variance of Blakeman’s crew calling a high volume of penalties allowed the game to be influenced by the officials and yes, have Vegas’s preferred outcome occur. It happens very often.

Biased is one way of putting it. The NFL is an entertainment product in the strictest legal sense. Although I might yell it out on game days, I do not believe the games are outright “rigged” meaning there is one team that is going to win no matter what happens. It’s impossible. There’s too much variance in the game that can prevent a truly rigged game from happening unless there was cooperation from many parties involved. What I am thoroughly convinced happens is that the NFL and referees “manage” the games towards certain outcomes. And that is done primarily through referee crew choice however I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more going on behind the curtain. The NFL uses the officials statistical tendencies to call penalties is to keep games close to drive user engagement. For example, If a crew tends to call more false start penalties, and there’s a game between a heavy pass offense where the NFL would like to manufacture a close game where it might have potential to be a blowout, then they’ll assign a crew that will slow that offense down and keep the game close. There is an insane amount of marketing and now sports betting money that is married to the NFL economic ecosystem. To think this whole system is fair when the referee union has no outward accountability structure for poor performance is just naive. It’s closer to the WWE than outward appearances suggest, but it’s not a fully scripted outcome either. So for those who say “stop watching” if you don’t want to watch a “rigged” game, it’s an entertainment product. You can still be entertained by it, even if it’s not as fair as a truly merit based sporting event.

Dan Morgan really knocked this draft class out of the park after a suspect 2024 draft. Props where props are due.

He will win I’m sure of it. No other offensive rookie has made a bigger impact.

The game was officiated just about how I would have expected. It was poorly officiated enough to keep a manufactured close finish. Honestly it was genius holding Icky out of this game. He would have penalized for at least 2-3 drive killing false starts with this crew. I have this feeling that our old friend Clete Blakeman is coming back to referee the final game of the season against Tampa. Hasn’t refereed a Panthers game since 2021.

I already laid out how this game would be officiated in my thread this week and it’s playing out exactly how I expected. It was an improved season and I think they can build off this next year. But the season is over, and we can all go on with our lives until next year.

Darnold improved a lot after spending a year off learning under Kyle Shanahan.