MasterAwesome

There are quite a few people who are upset we got Baker because we're gonna supposedly win just enough games for Rhule to keep his job. Those are the people who want us to lose and are legit upset because our team got better.

I suppose in your example, if Andy Reid is drawing up 30-35 pass plays for you a game despite you showing time after time after time that you're literally throwing the game away, and goes into every game with the same rigid gameplan instead of even attempting to switch anything up, has opposing defenses who laugh in his face about spamming the same play calls over and over again to where the corners can run our routes for us, and is routinely clueless in the red zone across two seasons with two different QBs...then yeah I would be equally critical of Andy Reid. Your argument would be convincing on paper if you were making it to someone who didn't watch any of our games and just simply read the box score every week. Otherwise it's quite easy to separate the failures of our offensive talent from the failures of our offensive coordinator. You don't realize that you're falling into the exact same trap as the few Darnold defenders who go "Well OF COURSE he has failed, look at his o-lines/coaching/receivers/*insert excuse here* during his NFL career! No one could succeed with that level of talent around him". When all it takes is simply watching an NFL game to see Darnold skittish and crumbling in the pocket and routinely making boneheaded decisions. Similarly, all it takes is watching a Panthers game to see the terribly predictable situational playcalling, the woeful lack of in-game adjustments, the extremely predictable offensive nosedive in the 3rd quarter, and the lack of a consistent balanced offensive gameplan. Those are the things you can't blame on the players. I've never talked about "winning", I don't care about that. I care about how the offense performed strictly within the scope of Brady's individual roles and responsibilities.

If your position is that all else being equal, you can swap out one OC with another and nothing will change with the product on the field, then you’re basically arguing that an OC is inconsequential and meaningless to your offense. You seem to be severely understating the impact of an OC on an offense. Just like a good QB can mask deficiencies with a bad o-line, a good pass rush can mask deficiencies with a bad secondary, a good receiver can mask deficiencies with a bad QB, and so on…..a good OC can mask deficiencies with a lack of talent through his offensive scheme. I’m not saying Brady should have taken last year’s offensive roster and pulled a top 10 offense out of his ass, but if Brady took a trash roster and produced a trash offense that lived precisely to its exact expected potential, then he’s essentially just a JAG who can be replaced by any bum off the street. In the NFL where we’re talking about the best of the best, you need players and coaches who can elevate each other to maximize potential. Brady was not that guy and is not that guy. Instead, he’s apparently the type of guy you hire to be Josh Allen’s QB coach (a top 3 QB in the NFL) lol. If that doesn’t tell you what the NFL thinks of Brady, then I don’t know what does. That’d be like hiring me to be the defensive line coach for a d-line of prime Julius Peppers, John Randle, Aaron Donald, and Reggie White. I mean I’d take that job, but I’d also be like “oh I guess they just want me to sit here and maintain the status quo and try not to mess anything up”.

That’s quite the framing lol. Tepper’s deference to Rhule is a bad thing simply because Rhule has shown poor judgment. Does that mean I want Tepper stepping in and meddling and overriding Rhule and Fitterer on football decisions? Hell no. An owner’s deference to their head coach as a management philosophy IS a plus…I can’t possibly imagine you disagree with that. Tepper already made his bed and committed himself to Rhule, so at this point I want him to entrust the people he hired to do their job. Otherwise you end up with a Jerry Jones or Dan Snyder. Tepper’s mistake thus far has been hiring Rhule - that’s his job and where he has dropped the ball. His job isn’t to coach this team and set the depth chart and manage the roster. If he kept Rhule and instead neutered him of all football decisions and took it upon himself to make those decisions instead, then THAT would epitomize ineptitude and would convert me into a full-blown bitter and miserable Huddler.

As opposed to...? You know the reason we're left speculating about what might have happened if we had taken a different approach with the offense last season? Because nothing ever changed with our offense gameplan....absolutely zero adjustments. And that will forever be the fatal flaw with Brady, regardless of our roster shortcomings. The game plan week in and week out was to trot Sam Darnold out there behind a turnstile offensive line and see how long it would take for him to implode. It was mind-boggling how little we seemed to game plan each week. Like I said, even against the weak run-defense opponents, we still prioritized the pass over the run. Even though we won those games...so it's not like we were forced to pass, coming from behind. All evidence points to a stubborn one-dimensional OC who had zero feel for the fluidity of an NFL game. Despite having over 1.5 seasons to settle into his role and show even a semblance of progression in that aspect of the game.

He also literally said in that same exact answer, that Rhule has final say. Which is exactly what was literally said in the post you quoted that you're trying to refute. Lol.

Well you're using our "weak run game" as justification for why we didn't run more, when the alternative (our pass game) was monumentally weaker by comparison. So you are ostensibly ignoring the elephant in the room when laying out your rationale.

"Talent" is a relative term that needs to be evaluated with respect to your personnel. You have to work with what you've got and maximize your strengths while limiting your weaknesses, regardless of how your talent stacks up to other teams. Was our run blocking and rookie running back liabilities? Yeah probably, but not nearly as much of a liability as our QB play and pass protection. You can't talk about how weak our run game was in a vacuum while ignoring the elephant in the room that was our abysmal pass game. With our roster, we probably should have been a run-heavy team. Instead, our OC would panic when down 3 in the second quarter and practically abandon the run game altogether...making our offense entirely one-dimensional to where the opposing pass rush could pin their ears back and ignore gap integrity. Even if you're not "imposing your will" in the run game, you still have to incorporate it into your game plan throughout the game to keep the defense honest. Out of those 4 bottom-10 run defense teams you mentioned we played, we still prioritized the pass in 3 out of those 4 games. That only serves to epitomize our poor offensive gameplanning.

Which sorta hints to me that Rhule may not have meddled with the offense as much as many people think. Rhule has been saying for a while that he wants to be a run-first offense, which happens to also be how he ran his college teams, but our offensive playcalling has not exactly reflected that. And when you consider that, along with who our OC has been the last two seasons (LSU pass game coordinator), it seems more likely that Brady was largely running his own offense. It's easy to imagine an inexperienced OC with an over-reliance on his bread-and-butter rather than branching out of his comfort zone to install a balanced gameplan, and I think that meshes with what we've seen on the field over the last couple seasons. I'm not too thrilled with the idea of being a run-first offense in the modern NFL, but I'm hoping we find a healthier balance. I think Ekwonu (who's a straight up mauler in the run game) and the return of CMC should help with that.

It's exciting to think we might actually have an experienced OC who is capable and willing to make adjustments instead of one who still thinks he's playing Rookie Mode Madden in his mommy's basement.

Yikes...he's a prime example of why you should have a personal Twitter and a business Twitter and keep them far, far detached from one another.

Relax man lol I was just goofing on you a bit given our relentless back-and-forth on the topic of Joe Brady. This was a weird escalation into debate mode...I know you're not trying to convince me with this, so is this just a performative thing or what?

CRA when he gets TWO threads in a single day to espouse his love for Joseph "the GOAT" Brady who orchestrated back to back 24th and 29th rated offenses:

Psh pretty modest...I'll take the Over!

DARNOLD NUT-HUGGER!!! Let's get 'em, boys!!

The Vice President of Player Personnel?

Does your friend also insist that the pool cabana girls are totally into him? When I was a naïve 21-year-old, a stripper gave me "her number" and told me how she wanted me to swoop in and rescue her from the stripping industry on a night where she funneled several hundred dollars from me. I had to learn the hard way that that's basically their job lol.

I don't know why you keep pivoting to league-wide perception. Are we still talking about Rhule's control of our locker room? Were we ever even talking about that? Maybe we're arguing two different things here. Regardless, if I'm to humor this point, why are respectable FAs (i.e. starting caliber guys who could easily have signed elsewhere for comparable money) still choosing to sign with us if Rhule is perceived as this incompetent fool across the league? That doesn't really make sense on its face. I truly don't remember any rumblings about an inhouse locker room rift last year. Do you happen to have a link or anything? This isn't a "gotcha", I'm genuinely interested in reading it if you can find it. Because that would have a pretty big impact on my perspective.

My "analysis of my own posts" was because you specifically asked me to explain my post lol. You ask me to explain myself...I do it...then you basically reply "tl/dr" and then later on criticize the substance of that same post you claim to not have read? You are all over the place. I think your issue with me really just boils down to my condescension, but for whatever reason you don't feel that's strong enough reason to criticize me so you're just grasping at straws to come up with others as you go. That's why I'm apparently both pithy and long-winded, super angry, bitchy, trying to be clever and intellectual, and I'm sure you'll throw in something new in your next reply. The condescension is fair, I can definitely be condescending. But surely you realize everything you've accused me of (except probably the "word salad"), you are guilty of as well. In this thread and the other thread from a week ago, you've initiated engagement with me with what you would surely classify as a condescending and bitchy little remark. Dare I say, even pithy. Then you get mad at me for engaging you with the same energy? I could post an identical screenshot from your profile of the same exchange we had from last week, where every one of your posts would be oozing with condescension and "bitchiness". You're not "holier than thou" bro, I'm sorry.

Oh ok well I guess I can pretty much accept everything you're saying except for this snippet above which I don't really understand. Who are "the people" you're referring to? Us? Or the players? I'm assuming you mean the players, in which case I don't understand how these two sentences logically follow. They seem to be two entirely different unrelated points. Is your second point/question suggesting Rhule has lost the locker room or that the players look at him unfavorably? If so, what are you basing that off of? Maybe I missed a report or some murmurings or something, but I don't recall hearing anything suggesting that players have turned on Rhule or something. I don't think we really have a finger on the pulse of the locker room. The only thing that comes even remotely close to depicting the vibe of the team is that video from a week or so ago that showed all the players + Rhule having fun with that sporting event (ping pong, soccer, squash, etc.). But I am assuming you would argue that that was just team propaganda. I'm just not sure what else we have to go off of. Also what are the metrics by which we are evaluating the "top 5 coaches" in Carolina? Like are we lumping all the coaches into one bin? Like James Campen (o-line coach) vs. Phil Snow (defensive coordinator) vs. Mike Siravo (defensive run game coordinator - yeah I had to look that up)? Cause that doesn't really make sense to me. There are probably a bunch of objectively good NFL head coaches and coordinators who have positional coaches underneath them who are better at their respective coaching positions than these HC/OC/DCs are at theirs. Again, all I care about is whether these coaches have the respect and loyalty of their players. If any coach has lost the respect of their players, then I would strongly advocate immediately firing that coach. Otherwise, I think players are able to compartmentalize the roles of their multitude of coaches and be able to say like "Damn Steve Wilks is a hell of a DB coach" without that needing to be a slight or indictment on Rhule or Snow. It's not like they have a limited quantity of "respect" that they have to decide how to divvy up among their coaches.

Well, I'll need to know the character limit of your attention span before I can actually respond. Apparently it's somewhere in the ballpark of 75-125 characters. Please help me find that sweet spot between "pithy" and "long-winded".

So is your argument that Snow is some kind of puppet or figurehead but that Wilks is really going to be running the defense behind the scenes? I'm just honestly very confused the further down this rabbit hole we go, which is a staple of conspiratorial thinking. Why wouldn't Tepper force Rhule to fire Snow as well and force him to hire Wilks as the DC? Hell, then we'd have another decent option in Wilks to fill in as interim head coach if Rhule gets fired mid-season. It almost makes TOO much sense if Tepper is thinking ahead to life after Rhule. To summarize: you believe Tepper, the owner of the team, would rather leave the current DC in his position in hopes of basically indirectly neutering his authority by instilling a well-respected and experienced DC to shake things up and undermine Snow? Instead of just firing Snow outright? Yeah the 2022 Panthers will almost CERTAINLY be incredibly dysfunctional if the owner deliberately brought in Wilks to undermine Snow's authority. That's almost the epitome of dysfunction and would be entirely on Tepper. Also why would league wide respect be relevant? I only care about who has the respect of the Carolina locker room. Do you think Wilks is more respected than Snow among our current roster?

I heard it's actually Sheena Quick from the future (Year 2033 to be exact, right after Baker's 4th Super Bowl victory as the Panthers' starting QB). She just accidentally got sent back to the wrong year and has been stuck in that safe ever since.

No YOU mad!! Am I doing this right? Is this seriously the level of discourse you want to contribute to these boards? On a side-note: what do you think "pithy" means? I'm not sure how you reconcile characterizing my post as both "pithy" and a "multi-paragraph word salad" lol. Those are quite literally completely contradictory.