BrianS

I do think there's a reason we won't switch, and it's our QB. He can't run that scheme.

If that's his reasoning - no one knows for sure - he's in the wrong. In the NFL route concepts are married to the footwork. If you get to the top of your drop and your receiver isn't where he's supposed to be, you move on to the next guy in the progression. You gotta do it that way to succeed. It also gives your QB the ability to go to the staff and say "Hey, I'm doing my part, what's up with the receivers?" I am completely baffled by the mechanics our QB puts on film. I am equally baffled by the lack of attention it seems to be getting among those who watch for such things. When you watch Cam's rookie footage, he has some footwork issues - but not nearly to the extent Bryce does.

I haven't seen this guy's content before, but he points out some things that other folks aren't. Specifically, he's showing examples of open receivers and Bryce not doing what is necessary to get the ball there.

Young has the same problem Tua and Mac Jones have. Average at best NFL arm. So what's the difference? With Jones, they look an awful lot like the same player if we're being honest. With Tua, the difference is the talent. Tua had similar problems before his roster got absolutely STACKED with receivers. With the receivers he now has, Tua doesn't have to throw to "NFL Open" receivers. He's effectively doing exactly what he did in college - throw to guys who are gapping their defenders so bad it looks like the SEC. Put any kind of stress on that offense at all, and Tue regresses to below average. Bryce has had opportunities to throw to "NFL Open" receivers. Plenty of opportunities if we're being honest. He hesitates. Or he's not set and ready to throw when the opportunity is there. Take your pick of the two.

I suspect not enough is being made of this "collaborative approach". It's a train wreck. It leads to a team with no idea what it's identity is. Sound familiar? Somebody needs to step up and say "This is what we are". Before the free agency. Before the draft. Before the meat of the offseason program. I understand wanting to evaluate the roster and fit a system to the players. But somebody needs to read the room and make a decision. "We'd like to be XXXX but we don't have the pieces for that and we can't flip it in one offseason". That's a reasonable response. I never heard it. Now I look on the field and I see a team with no identity. Our defense is struggling - injuries have hurt immensely and our offense isn't helping. Our offense is worst in the league. What is our identity? I don't have a clue.

It's good to see our tackles start to turn it around. Corbett's performance is probably to be expected given the injury. Hopefully they can continue to improve.

See, there's a flaw in your logic here. You're assuming that with Stroud here we'd be running the same offense. I feel comfortable saying we would not. Stroud is a classic pocket QB who also has above average mobility. It wouldn't make sense to run this scheme with Stroud. It was well known that Reich likes big, strong armed QB's. His system isn't strictly West Coast. He does have some WC concepts, but he's closer to Erhardt-Perkins which marries the WC concepts with the Coryell concepts. Had Stroud been the pick, I think our playbook would look very different.

See, this is important right here. Average QB's make the routine plays. Good QB's make the routine plays look easy. Great QB's make the routine plays look easy and then they stack spectacular plays on top of it. Everyone can decide for themselves which of those best describes BY this year.

I've lived that. It's a miserable way to live. You *know* what the right thing to do is, but you second guess yourself anyway.

Didn't know Casillas had pointed it out, but I definitely have. His footwork is bad, and what I find most concerning is that when you go back and watch his college tape, it's better. Even against teams like Georgia, BY was playing with better feet and base. Not so surprisingly, his ball had better velocity and accuracy.

That's easy. You go from an inside zone / power running team into a wide zone / West Coast running team. That's two very different kinds of lineman. We were built to run people over, and now we're trying to misdirect and outflank. I don't know what film the coaches looked at when supposedly designing a scheme to fit the players. It sure doesn't *look* like the scheme fits our players. At all. And of course, in typical Panthers fashion, what talent we do have is paper thin. One or two injuries can derail us. All because we keep trading away our picks. Did you know that of our last 10 first round picks, only one (Shaq) is still with us that isn't on a rookie contract? Yes, some deserve to be gone - Big Vern, KB - but how much better would we look with CMC and DJ on the offensive side? The worst part about those trades is that we actually paid BOTH of those guys and then traded them. So we took the big hit for the signing bonus and made the cap hits for them on their new teams much easier to swallow. It's nuts how bad we've been at roster building.

Why do we keep calling it a myth?

Just a sec now . . . . why would he change? Yes, 2022 was a bad deal, but it was widely reported that Irsay was meddling heavily - some say telling Reich who to start at QB. So, before that then. His Colts offenses were 5th, 16th, 9th, and 9th in points scored the years prior. That's pretty solid. I don't know if Reich is the problem. I am sure that our personnel is a problem. The decisions made there have not worked. Free agents, draft, cap, trades . . . it's all been a mess. And it seems likely that Tepper has his mitts in that too.

The fact that Tepper's wife is somehow running any part of the team is a tremendous red flag. She is completely unqualified. Fire Nicole. Hire someone like Kevin Colbert to run the team. Let him put his FO together, carte blanche. Fire whoever, hire whoever. With that done, let that group decide if firing Reich is the right call. The further away the Tepper's step, the more likely success is to follow.

The only person it makes sense to fire right now is Fitterer. You fire Reich now and you greatly damage your ability to bring in coaches. It says to every coach - "You get half a season and if it's not working you're gone". Coaches aren't dumb. They can see that this is becoming a bad place to be a coach. If you want to fire Fitterer, do it. Clean it out. And then hire a consultant to find your next GM. No Tepper involvement at all aside from writing the check. After the season, let your GM and another consultant decide if it's time for Reich to go. If this is just Tepper doing Tepper things, it's pointless. It won't change the course of this season. It won't make us look any better by the end of it. Even if our problems are schematic and coaching, you don't fix that mid season.

The Panthers offense with Bryce at the helm is producing a whopping 11.7 points per game. The Pickles led Panthers averaged 12.3. Gross.

During the pre-draft process, it was so blatantly obvious that Josh McCown had a flaming man-crush on CJ Stroud. He liked Bryce, sure, but McCown clearly thought Stroud was the better prospect. At the OSU Pro Day, McCown was even talking about shooting hoops with Stroud in Charlotte. SOMETHING changed that - and it certainly wasn't anything Stroud did on the field. Tepper is a known believer in analytics. He bought hook, line and sinker into that (*&@$ S2 test. Nicole looked at Young and saw someone her size. The Teppers didn't have to influence the decision much. Just "enough". I think our staff "liked" Bryce, and the Teppers tipped the scale when otherwise the staff would probably have made a different decision.

I disagree here. Mingo has been showing slow progress over the year. Receivers can tend to take time to mature into the NFL. Mingo has been playing like a rookie. That's ok. The problem is our staff were needing him to be an impact rookie this year, and he's not. We should be using him as a slot matchup nightmare, and we're still trying to make him an X or Y. Our receiver problem this year is largely self inflicted. We needed more speed and we didn't do enough to bring that in. Sure, we brought in Chark who was supposed to take the top off for us . . . but he's got a history of injuries - surprise! - he's been injured most of the year. We brought in Damiere Byrd . . . and released him. We had Shi Smith . . . and waived him. I mean . . . that's just about as self inflicted as you can get. I'm not saying Byrd or Shi would have solved the problem, but it couldn't hurt to have that kind of speed on the field. Certainly moreso than what we have now.

It's a problem that may not have a solution. The staff seem absolutely terrified of putting BY under center for snaps. That's one of those things that really needs to be looked at. Having him in the gun or pistol for every play makes us entirely too predictable. It's clear we aren't going to run him, so the read option that made Cam such a terror isn't going to happen. He needs to take snaps under center so we can open up some power running game that we currently don't have. Then you get to our pass game. It's a mess. Our personnel on the perimeter are not good, but our staff isn't helping. How many times have we run something like a mesh concept to create stress on a defense? I didn't see us run a single one last night. We keep putting all our perimeter players on an island, telling them to win and then we act surprised when they don't. What about our personnel groupings? We employ some ludicrous number of TE's . . . but how many 2 TE sets have we run? Not enough. 2 TE sets are great for a power running scheme, and we have the roster for it, but we don't utilize it? I don't understand. All last night I kept thinking to myself: How much better would our offense look if CMC were in the backfield and DJ Moore on the perimeter? Yes, we would have moved Burns to Chicago . . . so what? Maybe we don't have Mingo. Again, so what? Our front office created an impossible situation. We have a guy who MIGHT be a good QB (or might not) - but we don't have the scheme or weapons to find out nor do we have the draft capital to fix it.

I think you neatly summed up everything wrong with Tepper's stewardship. You can't have a non-football person making football decisions like that. You hire a real grown up, experienced leader to run the team - and you definitely don't hire your wife who has absolutely no experience. You've got to ditch Fitts now - regardless of whether it's his fault or not. I fully concede it may not be, given the Rhule era and Tepper being in charge. I don't know if Fitts is at fault, but it's very clearly a roster devoid of the requisite talent. I think you have to chase Samir Sulieman out as well. Our guy who is supposed to keep our cap in control continues to kick the can down the road and limit our options in the future. Tepper is a huge part of the problem. But it will be years before it's fixed, because we've already mortgaged our future. That assuming Tepper can hire people to run the Panthers and then just get out of the way. I'm not sure he can.

That's not what I said, at all. What I said, exactly, was "Here are the top 25 catchers this year. Draft round has little to do with success, except that the first round is better at every position". If you want to talk about flawed, your way certainly seems more flawed to me. Looking at draft success over five years eliminates a massive chunk of successful NFL receivers from your view. Good receivers have 10 year careers. Good receivers can also be TE's. It's universally true that the more you limit the pool of data, the less likely your statistics are representative. The larger the pool, the more likely your statistics are representative. I suppose that I could have looked at the all time most successful list and pulled data from that. What would that look like? I don't know, I'm not interested.

I don't think it's got anything to do with the team. This was her first "real" job - no idea how she was even qualified for it given her work history. Nevertheless, she was hired and after a year and a half on the job realized the the time required to be a writer for an NFL team was more than she wanted in her life. She said as much in the tweet. Nothing wrong with that from her, nor does it reflect on the team except to say that perhaps they should hire someone with a bit more experience in the field who understands the commitment required.

I'm not as convinced we need a first round pick to find a good ball catcher. Here are the top 25 receivers (TE's included) by yardage this year, and the round they were drafted in: Yes, there are 11 first rounders in there, but if you look at highly successful NFL players at ANY position, you'll see something like that. First round picks generally succeed at a higher rate than other rounds. What is incontrovertibly true is that we must draft better in the first four rounds. At all positions. Our first four rounds need to be wins, every year.

Scheme is a flea on the back of the monster. Bryce's problems are coming from weak mechanics, especially waist down. This is not a problem he showed in college. Anyone can go out and find his film from this year. Do so. Watch him from the waist down. Any game this season. What I see is a guy who is moving very slowly and tentatively. He is NEVER set with a good base to throw from. When he gets to the top of his drop, he starts to look very twitchy. These are deadly problems to a guy who doesn't have a great arm. Now, conversely, go watch the film below. Watch his feet. Purposeful, concise, solid. He OFTEN throws with an excellent base and subsequently is able to make the most of his arm. Several solid downfield throws. Particularly watch the velocity of the ball when he sets with good base. The only thing we don't know is WHY his mechanics have devolved to this point. Is he thinking too much? Possibly. Is he having trouble seeing downfield? Possibly. Does he have trust issues with his line? Possibly. The most likely situation is that it's combination of all three. I can safely and surely say that until these mechanical problems are fixed, he will never be a consistently good NFL QB. Scheme won't matter. Good NFL QB's have consistent, repeatable, solid mechanics in the pocket. Even the "creators" like Mahomes plays with a good base from the pocket. ESPECIALLY guys like Tua who don't have the biggest arm. Watch his footwork and base. Nice solid base, allows him to make the most of his arm. When Tua comes up short on downfield passes, it's nearly always his base that lets him down.

I could make a very good argument that Dalton could win games with our scheme this year. The more I watch the tape, the more concerned I am about BY.