kungfoodude

TBH, these are the kind of players that get weeded out of professional sports pretty quickly. Also, CMC is not that guy. There is zero indication that he isn't competitive.

I like the free agency. It actually helps basically all schools across the board. Pretty much only ancient HC's and/or HC's that haven't been able to adjust have been complaining about the free agency. Your fortunes can be made or broken every offseason. It's not like before where a bad recruiting class or two meant multiyear purgatory. I will never understand all the bellyaching about the NIL. If you want to talk about what ruined college athletics, it has been naked greed. Conference expansions for TV revenue, ever skyrocketing AD and facilities costs and now the attempts to permanently ruin the postseasons(football and basketball). All the kids did was get a very well deserved piece of a very, very, VERY broken pie.

College was 1,000,000x worse than HS. I can personally attest to this. Especially pre-NIL. Holy poo was it a sewer. Most of the AAU corruption came directly from colleges/coaches/alum or shoe companies through nefarious channels.

That is just Panthers history pain speaking.

It's rather absurd that the rookie contracts aren't fully guaranteed for at least the top 3 rounds.

Or Goff or Purdy or Dak or.....it's the era of doing this. You just gotta hope you aren't one.

Yeah, it's a tough spot to be in. There are no sure answers. You can suck wind and end up with Bryce or Sam Darnold. But sometimes you get Josh Allen or Joe Burrow. Or you can just keep trying to win and end up drafting Kenny Pickett or Dwayne Haskins. But, you could also get Patrick Mahomes or Lamar Jackson. Ultimately, I think you can't really "plan" for trying to get an elite QB or force it. Frankly, that is part of why we are in the spot we are in at the moment. You just do what you can to build a winner and hope your structure and evaluations end up with the QB that can either be truly elite or be the outlier that pushes you across the ultimate goal line of raising that trophy.

Yeah, it's a tough spot. Not too many teams in the last 30 years have won without an elite QB. It's a tough hill to climb but QB purgatory is worse.

Yeah, this was something that was bound to happen. The importance of having an elite QB will never go away entirely but these things go in waves.

Yeah, I don't post on social media, so I would guess that is largely true.

I will be surprised if we ever have a HC and GM in a stable scenario that are also on the same page while he is the owner. Tepper is a finance bro. They thrive on chaos to create opportunities.

I don't really care about your post at all. I just saw the direction of the discussion and this snippet from an article I read earlier in the day was a good spot to put non-Panthers info. I mostly don't care about the players personal lives. That's off the field/personal poo. Not really any of my business. I also don't know him personally so what would be the point of congratulating him outside basically attempting to draw attention to myself like so many in the social media/internet realm.

If we are going to obsess over ex-Panthers, here is a good one from the ESPN poll of NFL execs and personnel guys, this is the outside top 10 list. Just like CMC, he is who we thought he was. It's amazing that so many people get fanboy syndrome for these guys assuming it is the team holding them back. That's the minority of the cases in our history. It's basically poker "bad beat" syndrome. How soon we forget the reverse, all the guys we let go that tanked hard afterward.

I think the leash will be short, regardless, if he has another "comfortably" losing season. By that I mean, not really ever a threat to be 9-7. People forget that Tepper's track record is getting losing HC's out of here ASAP. The chances of him stomaching more than 3 losing seasons is almost zero.

The bad part is the pivot from Bryce could result in another coaching change, IMO. If we dive into another one of those, I think the downward trend will actually steepen.

Yeah, this is all projections of how it will turn out. Inevitability this list will look ridiculous in a full 2025 sesson hindsight, most likely. Still, I am pretty surprised that so many bristled at being thought of as having very, very lowly ranked WR and TE units. We literally have been for years. All you have to do is just have things stay the same and those are immediately bottom 5 units. It is easy to see why one would be reticent to have lofty expectations in the preseason. Gotta show it first when you are a perennial cellar dweller. That's just life at the bottom.

That's fine but you are just ignoring his logic behind because you just simply don't like it. That's your prerogative, certainly, but it doesn't invalidate his perspective. I would say if you weight the groups similarly to how he does, it's very hard to justify us being outside the bottom 5. On paper our WR group is easily bottom 3 in the NFL and our TE groups is probably bottom 5 too. As good as our RB corps is, for a "weighted towards WR" ranking of WR/TE/RB groups, it's very hard to justify anything outside the bottom 5. I don't see any reason to dispute it at all. These guys have to go out on the field and prove they are better than that. Nothing special about that scenario for a boatload if very unproven players. It just is what it is.

I am not gonna subscribe but I just plain don't believe we have had many offers.

I don't believe this at all.

His PPG actually did go up a little in Colorado. We will see. I still sort of believe we saw pretty close to the peak of his abilities last year. Not wishing him ill or trashing him in any way. Just tend to believe we did sell high and correctly so.

Well, other teams also had an offseason. I honestly agree with him. Right now I have way more faith in Coker ascending then I do XL. I think it's the TE/WR group dragging us down. Plus he does mention that the list was made with WR's very much valued more than RB's and TE's(I understand the thought process). In that context, we have a very aging AT, two "wait and see" second year players(one leaning bust) and a rookie. I really think this is a very fair rating, on paper and in the offseason. Quite frankly, aside from the aforementioned and aging AT, this is a bunch of guys still trying to prove themselves. Then when you go to TE, it's easily a bottom 3-4 unit on paper. That is probably being extremely generous. RB is where we make our hay. Probably a top 5-10 unit. But....he mentions early in the article that he doesn't value the RB units as much. So, really, it's the weighting of the skill positions that is what really fugs us.

https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/45679684/ranking-nfl-teams-wr-te-rb-groups-2025-season-best-players-playmakers-offense

Necas is great to watch but I firmly believe we were correct to sell high. I would be very surprised to ever see him come close to the clip he was scoring at during his time here last season.

Trading KK is still probably a tall order. He has a no trade list and even with the cap going up, not many are going to want his salary for the minimal returns he offers. Ideally, he had a "breakout" year early this season and then we can sell high like we did with Necas.

I agree. Blake seems like the classic Cane type of player. He is one I would be very reticent to part with at the moment.