Sgt Schultz

I think Allegiant Stadium is less elaborate, and more like Phoenix. As I understand it, the grass field is on a try like Phoenix that rolls in and out. The difference is Allegiant has an artificial turf field on the foundation that the grass field tray sits above when it is rolled in, whereas Phoenix is just the concrete foundation. I guess the tray for the field in Allegiant has enough support to not sit directly on the artificial turf when it is rolled in. From what I read, UNLV uses the artificial turf field. I don't know if that was by choice or the Raidahs don't want the additional wear on their grass field.

I'm a Blues fan, and I hated to see him go. I understood why, but I was hoping it would work itself out. He has steadily gotten to be more of a constant force over the last couple of years. Two years ago he would sometimes pop up and score or make a great play. That has become more steady since.

Clearly the Panthers need to cut their losses with Young now. No point in waiting. Fire Fitts for drafting a guy that may have been worth a 5th round pick as #1 overall. Burn the Young jerseys that have been made, collect the ashes, put them in a barrel, and give it to NASA to ship into space. Let's contact Dan McGuire to see if he has any sons that can throw a football. Maybe they inherited his size. Does that about cover it?

Pretty much. They are completely committed to player safety, until they are not. The reason they wanted that part of the meeting over with is if they dug into the data, they couldn't then deny they knew about the severity. Part of "plausible deniability" is knowing what information you want to be ignorant to, and then making sure you are never fully exposed to it. I hope the NFLPA sticks this issue up their arses. Other than Arizona coming up with a way to use a grass field inside their domed stadium, they have not made any progress on this issue. And in terms of cost, the NFL's Super Bowl groundskeeper, George Toma (used to be the groundskeeper at Arrowhead Stadium), who has the nicknames the Sodfather and The God of Sod, has always said to properly care for an artificial turf field was no less work or cost than caring for a grass field. Then again, this is the guy who would go to the Super Bowl venue to work on the field, and if it was an artificial surface, have a crew on their hands and knees searching for clumps of fibers that welded together from the friction and remove them. I doubt the NFL owners care about weeding out clumps of fibers and would love to remain ignorant on why he would do that.

Well, I have an advantage in that respect that the Panthers are not on very often here. The options here usually involve the Broncos, Cowboys, or Cardinals. But even that disincentive to watch aside, essentially I get an afternoon back for other things. Especially when the alternative is watching a form of entertainment that has better athletes than ever, but despite that the product is worse. Under Goodell's reign of buffoonery, the NFL has a lot more like the WWE than its former self. This change is no exception to that trend.

My viewership of non-Panther games has been low to non-existent since about 2017. This past season it was limited to the conference championships, Owl, and a few minutes of random games here and there. And I watched the conference championships largely because we had gotten together with some old friends, and they wanted to watch them. I "watch" the NFL the same way I watch baseball.....look at the results on Monday morning, see if I want to catch any highlights from those games, look at the standings, and get on with life. If the Panthers happen to be on here, I'll watch it. Otherwise, I'll watch it after exhausting all other possibilities. It has nothing to do with the players. It is pretty much exclusively about the league tinkering around with the game, in many cases needlessly.

Ah, but our heroes on the Competition Committee will go one better. Next year, they will change the rules to eliminate kickoffs. Instead the opponent simply gets the ball on the defender's 25, ala the NCAA OT rules. That will remove the crushing danger associated with kickoffs and most punts (some teams will find a way to go from the opponent's 25, out of FG range, and have to punt ala the Falcons in the final 5:00 of their Super Bowl meltdown). Think of the excitement. Then we can start attacking the unfair advantage defenses have by fielding 11 players against the 11 players on offense.

I would like to see them break .500. That is possible based on the schedule and what we think we know about the teams on it right now. We can get to nine wins out of going 4-2 in the division (sweep the Bucs, split with the Falcons and Saints), then win against the Texans, Colts, Titans, Packers, and grabbing a win out of the Bears, Dolphins, or Lions (all road games). That involves just winning games we "should" win. For the first time, we may have a coaching staff that lets us walk away from a game saying they actually stole a win. That could be the difference between 8 or 9 wins and 10 or 11. Just going from a staff that had us saying constantly wondering what the heck they thought they were doing while costing us another one to one that didn't steal any and but give as many away took us from a 1-4 start to a 6-6 finish. So, while I am setting my bar at 9 wins, I can understand people thinking there are 10 or more in this equation.

I can only say who it won't be......pretty much anybody who wore a Panther jersey prior to this year. Whether we are going to carry two or three, we are pretty much in a textbook scenario. We have a first round draft choice penciled in as a starter, a vet who realizes his starting days are behind him but can still contribute, and another young guy who may be able to work into being the backup. Ideally, we would have a better idea who Corral is, but you-know-who torpedoed that idea. Now we need to break from our tradition and not stop. If Corral suddenly looks like he could start, find out what someone would trade for him after this season or next (while still on his rookie deal), sign another "past his prime" vet, and draft another potential #2. If Corral winds up having been Rhuled out of any hope, the plan is the same without the trade unless there is somebody out there who believes otherwise of him. All that assumes Young will live up to his billing, but I think we can say his approach is a lot more like Peyton Manning than Jamarcus Russell, so we can run with the assumption until proven otherwise.

The best way I can describe my menial thoughts on Brady's personality was that he was a good fit for playing for Hoodie for 72 years. They both walk to the beat of their own drummer. I doubt Hoodie was try to sell you on some multi-level marketing scheme or his revolutionary idea on how to invest your money, but otherwise, they were probably made for each other. McDaniels is probably in that group, too.

And at some point drift off into his thoughts that he could still play if he wanted to.

You referred to that other "D" QB several times. Each time my heart skipped a couple of beats and my chest tightened. Given my family's history of hearts attacking them, that was not nice. What the heck did I ever do to you? And for the denser of our membership, yes, this is all tongue-in-cheek.

Me too. They spend a lot of time tilting at windmills. There was a time when they at least appeared to do due diligence before changing rules. Now, they seem to throw the dung against the wall to see what sticks. Every sport does it anymore, trying to lure new fans. The NFL is probably the worst at it now.

The problem is what we want has nothing to do with it. The league seems hell bent on engineering the kickoff out of the game without actually legislating it out of the game. You raise good points, but the competition committee has shown that they don't really care about what football fans think. They want to tinker with the rules endlessly. Most of the time I don't think they could answer the questions 1) what exactly are we trying to fix, and 2) how does this make the game better? Then again, we have people making major decisions in government and industry every day that can't answer those questions, but forge ahead anyway. People have to prove they are paying attention by effing with stuff.

The problem is the NFL is trying to eliminate kickoff returns without simply eliminating kickoff returns. They are trying to engineer an outcome without just taking the outcome. In their defense, they have been concerned about injuries on kickoffs for about a decade now. In their indictment, why not just eliminate kickoffs and give the opposing team the ball on their own 20 (more on why the 20 vs. the 25 later) after the PAT/2-point try? Just spitballing here, but what about onside kicks? The current rules reduced the success rate of those from about 20% to about 6%, and I don't know how many fewer are attempted (surprise onside kicks) because of the low chances of success. So they have virtually eliminated the onside kick, anyway, and especially those that are surprises. Given that, just give the team that would kick the option of kicking off or giving the opposing team the ball on the 20. If they opt to kick off and it is a touchback, give the opposing team the ball on the 25 as it is today, or maybe the 30 if you want to provide more of an incentive for them to not kick off. And by touchback, I mean an in-the-endzone touchback. If some team is good enough to kick off in a way that usually pins the opponent inside the 20, so be it. Seems like that would give the "kicking team" to opt not to kick off and address their concerns about player safety. Everybody would know when an onside kick was coming, but hell, everybody knows that since the rules changed, anyway. Or leave it the way it is and find something that is (more) broken to fix.

Exactly. The goal for Corral should be the same as it should have been last year: he starts the season as #3 on the depth chart and hopefully can work himself up to #2 because the current #2 (assuming that is Dalton) is not going to be here forever. Corral is on a rookie deal, take advantage of it. If it works, you might have a decent #2 which is rather important. Not top 15 starter level, but good enough. If it doesn't, you are in the same shape you are in if you get rid of him now. Add the fact that his first year here was a waste to the long list of things The Process screwed up. Of course, Rhule couldn't have done that last year because that would have put Corral in competition with "OOU" for the #3 slot and besides, he was a red shirt freshman. I'm not sure why all the angst over that. Nobody is saying Corral is going to be the starter, unless the two QBs in front of him go down with injury. That never happens, just ask the 49ers.

A sportswriter said something about 15 years ago that remains true: the number on threat to the NFL is the competition committee.

I believe so, too. I've been watching the NFL since 1969, and he could have been a force in every one of those years. RIP Jim Brown.

I could believe that about Hoodie. As a bit of irony, if it is true he probably inadvertently saved McDaniels from himself. Since starting 6-0 at Denver in his first year, the guy is 11-28. That's Rhule territory. If there are hard feelings, that situation would be like watching a western and when the gunfight breaks out in front of the saloon, coming to the realization you want both combatants to bite the dust.

Definitely. There was a lot of speculation in New England, almost an expectation, that he would retire a couple of years ago. I thought maybe he was grooming McDaniels to be his successor. Either McDaniels got impatient (bad move on his part given his shortcomings), Hoodie rethought that, or he has no definite plan on when he will step aside.

Sadly (or not) all of those names are legitimately on the hot seat, although I don't know that Smith's seat is especially warm unless they completely crater. The Falcons were better last year than most people thought they would be. Whether McDaniels is safe depends more on Davis' bank account by the end of the year than anything else. He could go limping back to New England and the safe cover of Hoodie again.

Has any former Panther ever inspired more excuses than Sam Darnold?

FWIW, I'm still ticked off at Brett Hull.

I get it on both ends of my fandom. I'm both a Panthers fan and a St. Louis Blues fan. Other than the Stanley Cup run and win in 2019, both teams are rather renown for letting fans down. So I get it, and I would describe myself as "cautiously optimistic" entering this year. That is about my upper limit for expectations from either team. Last year I was not cautiously optimistic. The Process torpedoed that level of optimism with his second year flailing around. My hope then was simply that he dispelled the thinking that he was a complete NFL buffoon. Instead, he reinforced it. This year we have an NFL-level coaching staff, they picked most of the players, they will hopefully adapt their systems to what the players they picked do well or not, etc. I think the roster is better. There is cause for optimism, particularly in a gawd awful division. But, all that considered, there still are years of past scars and disappointments. For me roughly 17 years worth as a Panthers fan and 52 of 53 seasons as a Blues fan. I'd be stupid to walk that tightrope without a net.