Mr. Scot

Where did I guarantee they're right? (Hint: I didn't) That they're professionals and we're just fans is valid, but professionals are wrong plenty. Helps a lot of you actually understand what you're reading.

See, what's extremely funny here is that inbetween telling everyone how smart you are, you're saying things that make it pretty clear you don't even understand what we're discussing I've said plenty of times that I don't know if Darnold will succeed, but the Panthers believe he will. They might end up being right. They might not. I don't know. Meanwhile, your response is basically "I KNOW THEY'RE WRONG BECAUSE IM RIGHT AND MY RECORD AS A MONDAY MORNING QUARTERBACK PROVES I'M RIGHT AND SHOWS HOW SMART I AM!!!" Sure, dude

People who think they're smart bore me. There's no less convincing way of making me think you're intelligent than saying "I'm intelligent".

Special teams value helps.

So he's a tryout player.

There's no way to know where our picks will be. All we can know is how many we have in each round. Far as I know, right now it's one in each round except the second.

Your opinions don't count as facts. And statements like "I'll put my track record up against the Panthers staff" lets me know you're not really worth talking to. Blowhards who basically think "I'm right because I'm brilliant and I always am" are boring.

It's not just about competition. As mentioned previously, the team plans to treat Darnold like a rookie they're coaching up into their system. That is a very difficult and time consuming thing to do. Asking the staff to try and do that with another actual rookie at the same time would have been a really tough demand. And given that they have some level of confidence in Darnold, they ultimately decided it was a task that wasn't worth it.

You can criticize however you want, but likewise those of us who think your opinion is stupid and uninformed can say so.

Kudos, John of Every Career.

I don't "like" Darnold. I have no idea whether he's going to be good or not. I do know the team believes he can. And I get that the concept a group of professional NFL personnel people could be right and you might be wrong is a difficult one to understand, but hey...

Call me crazy, but when a team chooses to execute a particular option, I tend to think that's the one they preferred.

Thank you for providing an example of the kind of person I described.

Ask Rhule. He basically affirmed it. Just out of curiosity, are you planning to be salty about them going with Darnold over who you wanted for the rest of the year or will you be letting this go at some point?

The fact that they had a couple of highly crowded prospects available, and passed on them, then executed Darnold's fifth year option the next day, ought to make it pretty clear to you the thing was a smokescreen. If that's not an obvious enough clue, look at what they did in the draft and what they're saying about Darnold now.

Multiple sources have confirmed we weren't interested in Lance. They felt like he didn't fit Joe Brady's offense. Their not attending his second pro day probably should have been a clue.

They were always going to pick up the option. That's pretty widely acknowledged now. I know some folks can't wrap their head around the Panthers commiting to Darnold (generally for no deeper logic than that they wouldn't have done it) but they did. It's pretty obvious to anyone who's paying attention.

It has to do with the fact that this year isn't standard.

A fourth from Houston.

Ah. Wasn't part of that convo, but I wasn't a big believer in Newman either. He had an awful Senior Bowl then skipped out on Georgia's pro day.

Pretty sure he's being sarcastic. For the record though, Newman is an Eagle.

I'm telling you how the evaluators see it, and yes it makes sense. If you were asked to hire five people this year based solely on stats but couldn't meet or talk to any of them while knowing that next year you also needed to hire people but would be able to fully interview and vet them, which of those two processes would you have more confidence in?

In years when there there was no Covid, sure. It's different this year, and multiple NFL people echo that sentiment.

The logic behind it actually has to do with the evaluation process. Even with things easing up, the virus left coaches unable to do a lot of the traditional things that are part of player evaluation. They did the best they could, but still had major limitations. It's expected that those conditions won't exist next year, which will mean that the evaluation process should be more reliable and effective.

It was reported and confirmed by Fletcher himself.