1of10Charnatives

Top shelf defenses almost always have more than one highly effective pass rusher. There is nothing to suggest anyone besides Burns is likely to fit this description this year. Our secondary could be top shelf, but the linebacking corps seems overall pedestrian (something I'm fine with for the moment btw, given our huge needs in areas much more relevant to winning), and looking at our DL overall, it does look promising, but I'm not ready to label it top shelf just yet. Let's see how they actually play.

Tax incentives for "economic impact" is socialism under another name. It is the government favoring one business over another. Sports teams are just the most visible portion of a corporate world that has learned to use the prisoner's dilemma as an effective tool to extort funds from the public purse. Prisoner's Dilemma Definition (investopedia.com)

Sports stadiums should never have been publicly funded to begin with. All major sports leagues are private businesses and extremely profitable ones at that. Why scarce public dollars should ever be spent to subsidize facilities for these teams is just the most obvious proof of our distorted priorities in a sports obsessed culture. Before anyone puts forward the tired economic impact arguments that have been trotted out ad naseum in the past, they should know these arguments have been largely debunked by economists as not being backed by any hard verifiable data. If you can't back it up with hard math, it's an opinion. Ask yourself this: How much money do you want taken out of the state budget for roads, your kids schools and public parks in your town to build a sports stadium for a team where every recognizable public figure associated with that team makes way more than you do?

I see your new country music and I raise you The Avalanches: Frontier Psychiatrist.

The fact he's the hometown guy is just the icing on the cake.

These are the kinds of people I want playing for the teams I pull for. I know a lot of people can support players on their team even when that player is an obvious jerkhole. I can't. At most I can do a Smitty who has his ups and downs, but who you at least can see is trying to be the best version of himself. Sounds like we got a stud for the OL AND the kind of person who is easy to cheer for. Can't ask for much more than that.

*munches popcorn and grins*

Welp.

Ugh. Now you've made me hate myself for asking a question for which the answer turned out to be Tom Brady.

I readily confess I know next to nothing about Corrall, but I started to look at one of his highlight tapes, and this is immediately my question: How many NFL QB's still playing past age 30 looked that skinny in college?

Are we absolutely certain that Fitz does not moonlight as a Russian or Eastern European gangster in the offseason? I mean, just look at the picture. Tell me you can't hear him saying in a thick slavic accent: "Look, my friend, I no make threats. I just advise that if the half million rubles are safely in my hands by Tuesday, it is better for everyone's health, yes?"

My interest was also at an all time low this offseason, and really tbh from about midseason on. Does one offseason completely reverse that? No, because while all these moves look good, we won't really know what we have until actual games are played. I'd say on balance I'm cautiously optimistic because they at least are focusing on glaring needs that were ignored before, causing me to cast aspersions on the ancestry, professional competence and general shoe lace tying mastery of more than one high ranking official within the organization over the past year. I am now prepared to concede that all key decision makers may indeed be able to tie their shoes without assistance, but let me see the team in action before I get wildy exuberant to the point of declaring they can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Is a fantastic scenario IF you have faith in the team's talent evaluation prowess. At this point, I think that's a very debatable point, however it does seem likely that things fell very much to their liking. I for one am just thrilled we finally invested in the OL in round one for the first time since Moses led his people out of Egpyt.

Woah woah woah Let's set realistic expectations. I'm sure you meant to say "May keep them from sounding like less of an idiot when they post."

No. To do that he would need to always be the person in front of me in traffic and the drive through line. Also he'd have to buy out the state highway dept. and run the road crews that are indigenous to I-85. And somehow be in charge of the weather in August, which I'm sure we can all agree is wholly unacceptable. No one should be covered in their own sweat 20 seconds after stepping outside. Gross.

If I ever start a garage band (I can't even read music) FAR from Terrible will be on the short list of band names along with Close to Tedium and Halfway to Hagerstown. It's not that I really want to play music, I just have a dream to stand on a stage and scream into a microphone "Hello Des Moines! Make some noise!" and have an assemblage of drunken teenagers and stoned,emotionally stunted adults make noises and gestures displaying various levels of enthusiasm. If you're gonna dream, dream big.

I'll readily concede that I can't claim to follow the NBA anymore except in passing, so my notion may very well be based on outdated info. I'd disagree only to say that the middle of the pack still seems like purgatory, but if tanking doesn't meaningfully improve your odds in the draft, a change that would seem a smart one if your goal is to incentivize every team to always compete, then teams will have to get more creative in their approach to getting better. Regardless, one of the factors that has caused me to lose interest in the Hornets from the days of my youth is their perpetual existence just in or just out of the playoffs. There hasn't been a compelling reason for me to be excited about the team for..... *looks at watch* ...at least 20 years.

Agreed.

I would argue that being one game away from the playoffs is the worst possible finish in the NBA. In a league where your fortunes depend heavily upon the top 3 players on your roster, if you're going to miss the playoffs, miss them big. Being stuck in the middle of the pack in the NBA is purgatory, you're never bad enough to get good enough picks to get meaningfully better.

By being an enormous sucess at investing. You were saying something about failure?

Just like a coach or a player can learn from early mistakes and evolve over time, I'm not ready to write Tepper off completely as an owner and just say we're doomed until he dies or sells the team. The reality is the decisions an owner makes are educated guesses at best, and while it's easy and tempting as a fan to sit back and kneejerk and say this coaching staff has to go (imo it does) or this GM has to go (not as convinced), the organization Tepper came from in Pittsburgh is one of the NFL's most successful over time, and since 1969, it has had exactly 3 head coaches. As bad as the Rhule hire looks now, and it looks fugging awful, Tepper could learn from that mistake and nail his next hire, or he could learn nothing and make another disasterous misstep. Looking at the history of the NFL as a whole, odds are he does something in the middle, but if our next coaching staff turns out to be inept, then yeah, we might not see a good team in our lifetime.

This. Today is the first time I've been on these forums in a couple months, and it's not because most of you smell funny. Okay it's not ONLY because most of you smell funny. It's because I've followed the team since the first year and right now the future feels worse than it's ever felt as a Panthers fan. Rhule and Co. have so thoroughly destroyed my passion for football lately that except for the Super Bowl, I missed an outstanding playoffs because I just didn't want to even think about football for a while because my team's situation is so depressing. I honestly have no idea how people in places like Cleveland endured whole decades of poo like this and still stayed engaged with the team and the sport overall. It has to be some sports fan version of Stockholm Syndrome or something. I just have got better things to do with my life than spend time and energy following and engaging blatant incompetence, even to criticize it. David Tepper, let me know when you're no longer running an organization actively destroying my love of the game. Til then I've got better things to do with my life than watch you and the clowns you've hired try to figure it out.

Let's make two lists. The first list can be all the Panthers FA OL acquisitions in the last decade that turned out to be good moves. The second will be all the Panthers FA OL acquisitions that turned out to be bad or spending money just to tread water. List one: Michael Oher....maybe List two: Literally every other FA acquisition. We just watched a Super Bowl in which the team leading at halftime was shut down in the 4th quarter due largely to their substandard Oline's inability to protect the QB when it mattered most. The Bengals probably hit the Super Bowl a year before they expected to on the strength of outstanding young skill position players, but despite the Oline being the team's obvious weak link, and the fact they should have plenty of money to spend in FA because all that talent is on rookie deals, I'll bet you dollars to donuts that Cincy can't improve it's Oline this offseason through FA, only through the draft. We're in the same boat except we don't have Joe Burrow, Joe Mixon and a bunch of outstanding receivers. We've got... umm... the guy who reportedly told Eli Apple he would never play in the NFL again when he cut him. The only way to fix the Oline that has any reasonable chance of success is the draft, and we don't have the draft capital to do it in one offseason. Buckle up folks, it ain't gonna be fun for a while. The team gambled and lost on various trades, so here we sit with gaping problems and no real means to fix them any time soon. Embrace the suck, it's gonna be here a while.

Oh and Jerome Boger. fug that incompetent moron.

Jerome Boger.