kungfoodude

Yeah, I think there are levels of it. I am not talking about absolute certainty. I just mean someone you truly believe is going to be the answer. If you don't believe that, don't take him. If you don't have a first round grade on him, don't take him in the 1st. That kind of poo. That is really where we differ. I am not talking sure thing, I mean someone you BELIEVE in. Which, we have to be careful that Rhule doesn't talk himself into a bum. It has happened twice already.

Every single thing about him screams used car salesman.

Also, this is the 4th straight year that Darnold hasn't been able to stay healthy am entire season. But we didn't need a real backup QB, of course. And how many games have Elflein and Erving missed so far?

Brady and Robby have their own issues but this is so obviously predominantly Darnold. How many times do you see him bail after one read and start rolling out while his 2md or 3rd read is wide open? It happens way too often. The coaches have basically been telegraphing the fact that he cannot be trusted for 3 weeks now. All that "running the ball more" and all that other BS, that was them admitting they had to take the ball out of his hands. My ultimate guess is that Brady and Rhule are paring down and simplifying the playcalling to make things easier on Darnold to get him going. Then he is just further fuging it up. That dude just does not have any NFL abilities between his ears.

I think we will at least see some splash plays in between insanely poor decisions.

No, I would have taken any of those top 4 in the top 10. Jones I would have considered in the 15 and lower range. He just wasn't high on my board. I think Wilson will end up being the biggest risk guy and Jones will be better than expected. TBD, I mean these guys are in the infancy of their careers.

Oh yeah. Plus....the more I dug into him the more he seemed like a hard working guy with a MAJOR chip on his shoulder that caused him to dig deep to be better. I just think he will work really hard to keep improving every day.

I had the 2021 class as this: Elite 1. Lawrence 2. Lance Near Elite 3. Fields High Risk Gamble 4. Wilson Low Ceiling, High Floor 5. Jones I definitely was much higher on Lance than almost anyone.

I can one up that. I said drafting him would be "...the biggest mistake in franchise history."

Depends on where we are in the draft. If we have the ability to get an elite LT, get him. Of we have the ability to get an elite iOL, get him. If we land in a funny range where we might be reaching and can snag two decent OL prospects by trading down, do that instead. It's gonna be situation dependent, obviously. I would never trade down if there is a top flight OL prospect, however. That is not smart. That is also what I would expect to happen.

I said this would not be a top 10 defense this season.

So he has five years to not win back to back season before you fire him? What if that is 5 straight losing seasons? Still waiting 5?

Depends on the caliber of prospect. QB will always be the #1 priority in the modern NFL. It's the most important position on the field. But if you have an elite OL prospect available and middling QB prospects, you take OL. If you have elite QB and OL prospects available, you take QB. Our issue on the OL cannot be fixed solely by free agency. It will be far, far too expensive. It also isn't going to get fixed in one offseason, the needs are far too many. Ideally, get a great OL prospect in round one this year(provided no elite QB prospect are available) and that is at least a start. Add another above average OL in free agency and now we have some base to work from. Just keep steadily building and investing in the OL(and any othet obvious holes) while you maneuver for an elite QB. Either in free agency, via trade or through the draft. But, both situations have to change. You can't have a bottom tier OL and the worst QB in the NFL. That won't work anywhere.

He is quite literally one of the worst I have ever seen at it. It's crazy. The craziest part? There was three years of film showing the same thing under two different offensive coordinators.

Same as this one.

Plus, Teddy played far better in front of the same line(basically) and in the same offense. That is as damning as anything.

Yep. It buys you time to build and find not only a QB but an OL. Teddy can make up for some of their deficiencies(and he did) but Darnold amplifies them. They got greedy and thought they were gonna win now. Guess who that sounds a lot like? Marty Hurney. Sam will likely never start another game here again. That experiment is so over that it should be a fireable offense to even out him in the game other than as a backup after the starter got injured. I think the staff also realizes that he will not play here anymore either. That's why they keep dumbing down the offense and trying to keep the ball out of his hands. You keep intersecting meaning in what I am saying. Point out where I said I am content being average "for years to come?" This is the same as me saying your point is that we need to be terrible for decades to get a QB in the draft. Neither of those is true so you need to stop interjecting the argument to want to argue against and just accept what I am saying in the literal sense. That's why I am pointing out the dangers of doing what you are talking about. I am not making definitive statements about it. Maybe we stink for a year or two and end up with the next Peyton Manning. Or maybe we stink for 15-20 years trying to find the next Peyton Manning. That's what I am saying, the teams that are constantly drafting high typically stay in those cycles for a long time. The reason being exactly what I am talking about. Mismanagement, poor evalutions, panic drafting and poor coaching. Any or all of those can keep you in a rut for decades. Sure, most teams don't maintain a lengthy period of high level of competitiveness, that is absolutely true. But would you rather be the Pats, Chiefs, Packers, Colts, Seahawks, Steelers or do you want to be the Falcons, Texans, Vikings, etc. Do you just want to be able to randomly put together a few great seasons or be in contention for the long haul? I thought that was literally the point of this rebuild. The former teams that I mentioned have rarely experienced "bad" seasons. They have mostly been average to elite. That isn't my accident. I would never in a million years argue against the value of an elite QB. Never. In fact I am on record here as repeatedly saying that it is the most important piece of a successful modern NFL team. By a wide margin. But, this acknowledgement doesn't mean that I want us to just draft a top 5 QB of every draft class. Look back 20 years and you are gonna find some amazing years for that and then a lot of really awful years for that. That's basically my entire point and why I keep beating on the evaluation and not reaching. If you don't believe he IS The Guy, then don't waste valuable draft capital on a guy that MIGHT be The Guy. After all, that is basically how we ended up with Sam Darnold.

I think Tepper created that situation himself. Most experienced and knowledgeable owners typically don't hand over complete control, especially to someone with no experience. I agree Matt Rhule didn't have that track record but that does beg the question, why did he get all that money and power without the track record?

Well, that is also speculation on our part, in fairness. Maybe it really didn't happen against the Falcons. Maybe it did but there wasn't an obvious sign that there was an issue, other than maybe some soreness. There are just as many valid reasons they wouldn't check him out or that Sam himself may have not really thought it was anything more than soft tissue damage. I am not even saying they might not have fuged something up but we really don't and won't know the complete situation unless Darnold decides to say something.

I suspect that the injury is more minor than is being reported. If it were a massive break in that area, he would simply not have been able to compete. Even the accounts of it were basically the day after he reported it being sore and so they did an MRI. I would guess that during the game it was also just sore and Darnold probably just interpreted it as getting whacked by that hit(soft tissue damage/bruising) and not any structural damage. I have definitely had hairline fractures before(in my feet) that I was generally unaware were present, other than the obvious initial damage which I interpreted as just bruising from the impact. For me, it wasn't until it just wouldn't heal up after a couple of weeks that I even thought it could be something more.

If he can just hit 20% of the open players, it will be a MASSIVE upgrade from Darnold. I am not sure I can ever recall seeing more open WR's in an offense that are just simply not seen. Sam Darnold is 100% the worst QB we have ever had at seeing the field. The only one that might even be in the discussion is probably Jeff Lewis. It has to be INSANELY frustrating to watch film every week and see these players being schemed open and the QB simply not going through his progressions at all or reading the field. If you have All 22, just go play by play and watch some of this poo. Honestly, the worst case has literally been the Huddle's new whipping boy, Robby Anderson. Go watch how often he is wide open in a game. It's insane. Darnold is gonna be one of those guys that in a few years people are going to speak their minds a lot more about that situation and I think you are going to hear how bad he was at playing QB.

If he can just give the team some spark, that would be enough. None of us have illusions of being a winning team this season. Just go down fighting and competitive, like last season.

It isn't about pinning hopes on any "bridge" QB. The truth is, we made a massive mistake letting Teddy go. He was the QB we needed to be acceptably mediocre while our defense won games. He also deserves a big apology from myself and most Panther fans because a lot of the things he has said about our coaching staff(which were not as critical as we all interpreted them) appear to be pretty fuging accurate in hindsight. I would not have expected to make the "wish we had Teddy back" plea at all. I was one of the lead members of the "fug Teddy, get him gone" squad. However, we somehow managed to downgrade many levels with Sam Darnold. So, that being the case, I am on the average journeyman QB bandwagon for a few reasons. First, we simply must steady this ship. If my choices are winning with a ceiling and runaway losing, I am gonna choose the former. Second, we have a good enough defense to win games. We literally need a good enough offense for them to not LOSE games like the current one is. To that point, if you transplant the 2020 offense into this 2021 defense, we might be a 6-8 win team 9 games into the season. Thirdly, we cannot simply just panic draft QB's in the first round over and over. The biggest reason is that if we keep failing the way we are failing, all these promising young players are going to start opting to go elsewhere. You think DJ Moore wants to continue to have a revolving door at QB during his prime years(7 different QB's in his rookie contract)? You think guys like Chinn and Burns are going to want to play their hearts out every week just to watch inept coaching and bad offensive play squander it? You think elite veterans like Stephon Gilmore are going to want to stick around losing franchises? So, in closing, I want to see a steady journeyman here to right this ship, give us time to go out and find The Guy, and possibly have enough success to retain core players and attract quality free agents. Because, the alternative of continuing to gamble wildly at QB and shuffle the deck every year....that is going to lead to being....the Cleveland Browns from 1999-2017. I can't beat that dead horse enough. We are literally tracking towards that level of mismanagement. All that shuffling didn't lead to franchise QB's at every turn. It led to almost 20 years of suffering. As an organization, I am very concerned we are teetering on that ledge. I was dead set against a "full rebuild" after the 2019 season because I said that most organizations that undertake such a venture take years and years to ever see success again. There just isn't a great precedent for that in the history of the NFL, ESPECIALLY in the salary cap era. Successful franchises constantly retool and tweak to maintain a level of winning that is acceptable. They don't put charges around the foundation and raze it to the ground in an attempt to build from nothing. It is a massive gamble to do something like that and it has oddly gone much better than expected but this new foundation we are building hasn't set yet. We fug it up and it will come crumbling down, yet again.

As I said, PJ is decisive about what he does with the ball. His decisions just tend to be wildly aggressive, sometimes for literally no reason at all. Also, his Bad Throw % is pretty terrible. Either way, I am just glad to see some other different shitty thing.

You can either prove me wrong or right. I don't care at all. I am not triggered like you appear to be. Just stating the obvious.