Khyber53

Always loved Pep and I understood why he went to Chicago and cheered when he eventually came back home.

One of the catchiest rock tunes.

And another new one. This one was pretty astounding how someone would just flip and run. Gambling is a hard, hard drug man.

High character players will win seasons for you.

Bryce. Not that Juan isn't trying, but yanno.

He's such a good kid. I really hope he can shine this season and prove the doubters (including me) wrong. I'm really pulling for him to make it.

I think, in the future, that if municipalities are pretty much required to levy a tax to support these kinds of renovations, or rebuilds, then the amount of money should be weighed against purchasing that percentage of ownership of the team. Imagine having 1 million Charlotteans as 30% stakeholders in the Panthers. Yeah, that would scare team owners into financing their own massively profitable ventures.

New story I wrote just went up. We tripled our research efforts to get this one, let me know what you think of what turned out. Powerful moments in it, particularly when the detective says, "She wasn't a very big girl."

You know, like classes outside of the business school. Just spin off all college sports into developmental, for profit leagues and let universities and colleges get back to educating people for their careers.

I just don't know. New coach, new system, new management, new weapons, excellent draft, great free agency pick ups. I mean, that's gotta create optimism, right? Except we've heard this before. Like three times in the past six seasons. I hope Canales has the answer, but they're going to have to make me believe this time. Show me something. Anything.

I want us to become a smashmouth football team again. On offense and defense. It has been a long time since we dictated the terms of a game to the other team. Yeah, run heavy will be great and will give whoever our QB is a chance to make the most of their skills.

The organization was poorly put together from top to bottom and it shows. Management was in bunker mode and we had a guy as GM who could not evaluate talent either in the draft or free agency. We had just gotten away from a "culture" HC who needed to stay at a mid-majors college and replaced him with a guy who had a lot of emotional ties to the team but had just come off of a collapsing team of his own in Indianapolis. And that guy built a coaching staff, one heavily influenced by ownership, that was just not ready for the roles they were given and could not gel because they could see the collapse and were oftentimes worried about their own skin more than what the team needed. On the field, the team was just atrocious. The o-line suffered some early injuries and could not hold together because there was no depth and little coaching. Game planning seemed to make no effort to shore up the line and the rookie QB could not make adjustments, did not have the tools in his tool box yet, to offset this in even the least. Our highly recruited FA RB turned out to be a powder puff, our receivers were slow to the point of making people pine for the days of Kelvin Benjamin. We had one receiver who could actually run a rout and catch and he was double covered on almost every play. Our tight ends were just completely ineffective because of a lack of talent and using the same play concept over and over again. And our defense? Well, statistically, particular in yardage given up, looked great on paper. But it sucked, too. It just didn't suck as bad as our offense, which was historically bad. The highlight of our team last season was our Special Teams play. We had a good kicker and punter. The saving grace of our team last season was this: The NFL had not gone to an 18-game schedule yet, meaning the faithful didn't have to sit through another week of watching that mess. Good luck to the new coach. I'd like to say there's nowhere to go but up from here, but I said that about this time last year, too. I don't want to be amazed by how wrong I was again.

There's more to coaching than play calling, even down on the field. Madden isn't going to simulate how your WR1 had a big fight with his wife the night before the game and is stiff from sleeping on the couch. It's not going to simulate that the fight was because the QB's wife was flirting with the WR and now, because she went full on ballistic that the QB now knows about it. It's not going to simulate that questionable bucket of wings your o-line shared three hours before the game is now causing cramps and gas. It's also not going to simulate the real wear and tear of the season and how about December even the moderately good teams are about halfway spending their brain power on picking their January vacation destinations. But for a video game, it's pretty good.

He's terrible until he proves that he's different. We're the worst team in the league until we prove otherwise. Same story, just a different year. It's up to the 53 guys on the team, the coaches, management and ownership to change that and it is going to take a lot of work to pull us out of the ditch they've driven us into over the last five years.

Good! It's time for him to get even more acknowledgements for what he did on the field and what he has done off the field. A couple of incidents in practices have been hung around his neck like an albatross. Deserved or not, he has more than redeemed himself for all of the good he has done. Sorry, I love Smitty.

Great guy, had some hard luck. I was really hoping he'd have the opportunity to really come back. Well, here's hoping he has better luck in his future endeavors. Good people deserve good things.

And that means at least three of them are now making enough money to pay off their students loans in the next 10-12 years! (For those not on scholarships).

If Bryce had sat the first year and Dalton had played, then we would have learned nothing. Nothing. And we'd be going into 2024 awaiting the disaster that we just had. About the only difference would be that perhaps Chicago wouldn't have gotten their pick of QBs and Pittsburgh wouldn't be looking at grabbing Odifer-Russ and Justin-there-to run-around-the-Fields on the cheap.

Cousins does what a QB is supposed to do, he makes a team competitive. And he will. Just not sure that the rest of the team has enough in them to make it into wins. Time will tell. We've got our own fish to fry.

Just win some games, man. Crank out a winning season and the fanbase will start cheering and believing. It really comes down to that. Win. Or don't. That's the whole dividing line.

The biggest problem we've had with this team since Rivera left is that we have become progressively more timid. Certainly on offense, but mostly on defense. Football is not a finesse sport. It isn't gentlemanly. You don't want to kill or injure opposing players, but it is essential that you knock them hard enough to intimidate them or at least make them pensive about every move they make. We used to be those guys. And we haven't been for a very long time. So, I hope Dan and Dave can bring us back to this. We need it. And a tough, hard hitting team always gives you a shot, even when you might not have the finesse talent on the field. Yes, it is a passing league, but scared or addled receivers and QBs change the whole game. We need our grit back. We've been a bunch of neutered Persian cats for too long.

Dan's got quite a job to do washing the stink off from the Fitterer regime. Maybe he will, maybe he won't. I wasn't happy with our choice to keep him, but even I've got to say he seems to have done well, at least on paper, for this point. But we've felt this way before at this point in the season -- All optimistic. I'm not completely withdrawing my earlier judgement, but he's beginning to make a case for himself.

In Green Bay, it all looked stupid until Aaron Rodgers had pooped in too many people's seats and was sent of to his reward with the Jets. That whole Jordan Love thing looked stupid at the time. Then by about October we were all like, "Well, would you look at that!" Cousins is on the later years of his career, is just coming back from a major injury. He's also an excellent QB to have a guy sit behind and study for a couple of years. If Cousins starts to slide or decides to retire or doesn't fully recover from last season's injury, they've got their next guy, studying and easing into the league without being thrown to the wolves (you know, like Bryce). And what if Kirk Cousins has the fountain of youth, even expands his game and just cements his spot as QB1? Well, there were quite a few guys trained behind Tom Brady that got traded for draft picks along the way. If it can keep from destroying Cousins' confidence, then this wasn't a really stupid move. As much as we'd like for it to be.

And squirrely as they come. The more I read up on Smith-Wade, the more I think this might be the best pick we made. Really hoping to see him out there making some QBs look really bad.

Just looking at this moment in time, rather than holding off until we see something for it, I'd have to give it a B+/A-. We added a lot of players and a lot of potential. We may have reached a bit with our first pick, but the simple move to make it at the end of the first round gave us a shot to make it last a bit longer if he really blossoms here. That was a pretty smart move and had a lot to do with Morgan and Beane's relationship I think. Picking up an injured running back in the second sounds like a foolish move, but honestly, it's a solid gamble. We know what the floor would be on the pick, that he might never play at a professional level due to that injury. And honestly, that is the floor on any pick you make. The ceiling on the guy could potentially be immense. He was outstanding on a mighty fine team that was pass heavy and he doesn't have a lot of mileage. If that knee heals up completely (and we have a lot of experience with that in Carolina), he could be a massive steal and just what Bryce needs. There are a lot of people harping on our LB pick, but man, I always take it with a grain of salt when folks decry a player's "football intelligence." It's one of those criticisms that is easy to lodge against a young guy, but really hard to quantify. It might be nothing. His reputation for being a hard hitter and instinctual tackler are more important I think. He's going to have a good mentor in Shaq in the LB room and there's an institutional strength in our LB corps that could give him quite a boost. Our TE pick in the fourth may very well be the steal of the draft. I think we're going to see some serious production out of him. I'm hoping for something Olsen-like. He's definitely an upgrade to what we have now. And from there, well, the tea leaves get a little harder to read. I think Morgan did well with the trading and he cast a wide net for positions. We're going to have to see how it all shakes out, but just based on the three days of picks and the work that went into them, it was a good performance, better than I expected.