beo

OOOHHHHHHHHHH CAAAAAAAAAAM

that's the loudest i've heard our stadium in years, sounded like the sb was on the line

It really was just an overnight transformation. Last week and the few games before people were angry, yelling on the sidelines, face in their hands... this week everyone's all smiles. Cam brings such an incredible energy to a team.

If anyone ever questions Cam's leadership abilities, redirect them to this game.

Kyler and Hopkins don't play defense. We'd be winning even if they had both right now with the way this team is playing. Those little empty sets they run without that many blockers don't work well against this defense with all of it's creative blitzes. Not to mention the offense looks amazing against a top 3 defense.

NOTE: Unless noted otherwise, I got the stat from Pro Football Reference. People are getting caught up on the fact that we just resigned Cam Newton. That's understandable, but I believe some people around here are expecting too much and some are expecting too little. Cam isn't what he was, but he's also an upgrade over what we had and frankly this team doesn't need that much at the QB position as things are now. We need Cam to protect the football, find the open man, sustain drives so that our defense isn't pinned back, and be a vocal leader for our offense. Anything else like his running ability is just gravy. A lot of folks have soured on our defense but I personally think this is a little misguided. They still make mistakes, but most of them are very common and typical of a younger unit such as overrunning sacks, biting on read options and play fakes, and the occasional large rushing lane. You don't want this obviously but it's the NFL and our defense is young and growing, poo happens. As things are now, our defense is ranked 31st in average starting field position, the defense being set up at the opponents 32 yard line on average. The only team they are ahead of are the Jets, who are ranked DEAD LAST in points allowed. In fact of the bottom ten lowest ranked teams by this metric, only two have good defenses. The Buffalo Bills who come in at 26th (#1 PF, #1 YDS) and the Pittsburgh Steelers who come in at 22nd (#8 PF, #14 YDS). On the year our defense ranks 7th in PF and 2nd in YDS, with that going up to 5th in PF and unchanged in yards if you look at the per drive stats. As well, the average starting field position for the D predictably gets worse in the third quarter with them on average being set up at the 35 yard line (as seen below). This isn't a huge difference, but it's still considerable and the offense needs to improve in the third and stop turning the ball over so much in rapid succession. So where does Cam come into this? Well we need Cam to be careful with the ball. For the most part last season he was. Though his overall statline of 21 total tds to 10 turnovers nor his total yardage of 3,249 yards were very impressive, he had 5 ints immediately after getting off of the rona list in the two games afterwards but finished weeks 6 through 16 with only 3 ints to 6 touchdown passes. He also added 7 more rushing touchdowns in this span, meaning he had 14 total tds (1 receiving td in week 17) to only 3 total turnovers over the last 10 weeks of the season. This is despite a pourous receiving cast, questionable offensive playcaller, and being pressured at a percentage the tenth highest of any QB last season at 26%. Those receivers by the way mostly played better last season with Cam than they have so far this year. Julian Edelman had his best career game with Cam, Jakobi Meyers was higher/more efficient in nearly every category last year than he is so far this year (Catch%, YPG, Y/TG, Y/REC, you name it), and he even got 600 yards out of Damiere Byrd. It's also worth considering that our offensive line while still definitely bad, has slightly improved from being unquestionably bottom 2 in the last couple weeks. In week 8, the offensive line only allowed 5 hurries and 2 QB hits. In week 9, it allowed five pressures and 1 sack according to PFF. Will this continue? Probably not, at least not at this rate, but it's at least an encouraging sign though the injury to Paradis hurts. There's also the fact he'll have a much better supporting cast than he had in New England with CMC, DJ, Robby and other solid support pieces like Chubba. There are some questions regarding the fit though. Cam has never really played in a pure west coast system like offensive coordinator Joe Brady runs. Speaking of Brady, there's been a lot of concerns over him. These are absolutely reasonable but you must question how much of this mess is his fault. We have a bad offensive line and had a quarterback who misses open receivers, and it was known going in that Brady did not call the plays at LSU meaning he'd have growing pains there. Sam also just misses open receivers and throws a lot of hospitial balls. It's no coincidence that our receivers are dropping so many more passes than usual all of the sudden. There are a lot of unanswered questions about this move that will be answered soon, but for now I feel good about it even from just a football perspective. Cam doesn't need to be great, he just needs to be a veteran leader for this young team and offense, get the ball to open receivers, eat up clock, and prevent giving our defense short fields by taking good care of the ball. His now limited deep ball's wild misses and occasional spike at the ground will occur in some unfortunate instances, but I think Cam can once again be great for this team; just in a much different way compared to the big play flash of his vintage days.

Igo how are the servers doing right now?

I was kind of sad when I first heard this news because I don't really want to watch Cam get destroyed behind this line again, but when you really think about it this could be a good move just from a solely logical persepctive. There's been a lot of talk about our offense not having a real leader you can turn to when things get tough to pump the team up. Cam will definitely bring that to you. Even if he really is shot as a thrower and is no longer anywhere near top 10 in that category, his running will open up CMC and a lot of the offense and at the very least Cam won't flat out miss wide open guys like Sam does sometimes. The defense is already borderline elite (look at their per drive stats and average starting field position) but has some growing to do and even the OL hasn't been completely terrible lately although it's still a bad unit. If Cam has something left in the tank he could be good for us, not to mention the obvious emotional baggage here. We need someone to help teach this team how to win. I'm consuming the hopeium goddamnit. edit: wording

He honestly might go higher than day 3. The dude has hit multiple 80 yard punts, one of which I watched live and nearly sh*t myself. Not only that, but he's athletic and also handling kicking duties... he punts and kicks at the same time. That is very rarely done. Isn't quite as good of a kicker, but still impressive.

I like Dave Toub. He has been the best special teams coord in football for 15 years and has held AHC with the Chiefs for a few seasons now meaning he probably knows how to manage a lockerroom somewhat. I know it's a bit of an untraditional pick, but Jim Harbaugh was also a special teams coord. I think this team would do better with a coach that has more NFL experience and Toub has KC connections and can bring over some of their coaches. Him and Moore intrigue me.

LOL

Yup. Miami is in free fall mode as well and their line is probably the only one in the league that can compete with ours for the title of worst in football. I've seen a couple Fins fans call for Greg Little to get playing time at tackle. The coaching staff or offensive line will play little bearing on whichever team he picks because both candidate teams look really bad in both categories.

Paradis would probably still be an above average C if not for that injury making it harder for him to anchor. There's a reason Denver let him go after that. He's still presentable as a run blocker but a liability in pass pro and as you said, when he fails it's absolutely horrible (and sometimes hilarious). If he had good guards around him, I actually think he'd look okay but he doesn't and it just exacerbates everything. Our line doesn't seem to be the usual kind of suck; our players seem to mostly be in the right position and on the correct guys outside of some issues with stunts (but to be fair, that's the entire point of calling a stunt. to confuse the protection). There's not too many free runners relative to what you'd expect for a line at our level of suck from what i've seen. That's usually indicitative of a C doing what he should in regards to calling protections and all that. The problem is they just cannot block the man across from them.

kill me

Bringing back Cam at this stage, a franchise legend all busted up and a shell of what he was to get murdered behind this line for half a season on a crappy team after that messy breakup would be so unbelieveably depressing.

TIME FOR THE THIRD QUARTER

the only correct choice is the bottom one

did they really just run the same play 3 times on one drive and score off of it

draft matt araiza

This'll be a get right game for us, I think we'll beat them soundly and convicingly. Panthers: 23 Giants: 6 An already dreadful team missing a lot of its starters,I think we'll come out amped. Our D will dominate, the offense will still have its hiccups and I would bet a good amount of their points come off turnovers inside Giants territory. We lost to two teams with a superior roster; only truly bad loss was that damn Philly one. If we do somehow manage to lose this, we will be in free fall and I'll start to become worried about us potentially undershooting the 8-9 win mark. That'd be a worst case scenario. Alternatively, we'll do what CRA suggested and dominate the game in the yards category but miss oppourtunities on crucial downs and as a result never go up as much as we feel we should similarly to the Jets game. Could see either happening.