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knowing everything you know now, who and when would you have replaced jake

Fiz

By Fiz,
in Carolina Panthers

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Fiz Newbie

Fiz

Posted
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A lot of people are kinda foaming at the mouth that Jake was ever a member of the team to begin with. I'm trying to look back on all of this and see when the Panthers would have feasibly traded him/cut him/signed someone/drafted someone else. I think I'm coming to the conclusion that due to a number of circumstances the Panthers kinda never had a better option.

AFTER 2005

Certainly you wouldn't make a move after 2005. Jake had just got the team to the playoffs despite the collapse of his running game. The Seattle game wasn't a meltdown like Arizona and yesterday were, it was just the result of a very good defensive game plan by Seattle and a number of injuries to the Panthers. So the 2006 draft/offseason, nix.

AFTER 2006

Maybe after the 2006 season? He wasn't great, but not terrible. They had that whole Keyshawn Johnson scenario. They would have made the playoffs if not for a series of mind boggling individual efforts. Actually, looking back at that season I'm not really sure how the Panthers didn't make the playoffs but whatever. I'm going to go ahead and say, though, that after 2006 not many people were screaming for a new QB. That wasn't the most pressing need. Furthermore, you surely wouldn't trade Beason for a first round QB, and the best free agent of that period was Kerry Collins, who though I feel would be an upgrade over Jake I don't ever want to see in the state of NC again. In the 2007 draft, the best drafted QB was Tyler Thigpen.

AFTER 2007

So what about after the 2007 season? Through 2.5 games, against weaker competition granted, Jake looked better than he ever had. He was throwing the ball away, making better reads, spreading his passes around, etc. His technique looked better. Maybe he'd been pressed by David Carr, who knows. What we do know is that the best free agent QB was Derek Anderson. And we also believed we had our heir apparent in Matt Moore, who I still haven't given up on.

But let's talk about that draft. Obviously it'd be nice to have Matt Ryan here, but that wasn't going to happen because Atlanta was dead set on drafting him. The only real option was Flacco.

Here's what we know. If the Carolina Panthers had drafted Joe Flacco, there'd be no Jeff Otah and there'd be no Jonathan Stewart, barring another first rounder trade. There might be a Matt Forte, best case scenario. So just throwing these out there, the Panthers could have Flacco + Forte, Otah + Stewart, or (the one I wanted them to do DAMMIT) Otah + Forte.

Then clearly Flacco isn't going to start. Jake will. He's not going to progress like he did in Baltimore; his coach there is a former QB. He wouldn't have started last year, since obviously you don't draft him and start him ahead of Jake, so this year would be his first and he wouldn't be an obvious improvement. Lastly, I tend to think his numbers are a little overinflated, and yesterday's explosion can be explained by it being the Chiefs.

This is defensible, though I think kind of hard to make a cogent argument about. So many things happened in that draft it would be like retconning world war 2 where the nazis won. Without Otah however, I don't think the Panthers go to the playoffs. Without a first in 2009, they're still in the same position with the same weaknesses. And no offense, but with that gameplan yesterday, it wouldn't have mattered who they had behind center.

AFTER 2008

There wasn't a single viable upgrade option in 2009 and I don't want to f**king hear it. The Panthers didn't have the ammo to pull off the Cutler or Cassel trades and there was no viable improvement in the draft. Eat a dick.

So yeah, short of completely altering the course of this franchise by playing Madden with the 2008 draft, where do you improve?

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Sam Mills Fan Newbie

Sam Mills Fan

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We should have started looking for a long-term solution the quarterback position after 2006. The only people to blame for us being stuck with the worst quarterback situation in the NFL right now are John Fox and Marty Hurney. They've had countless opportunities to upgrade in the past three years and chose to neglect the most important position on the team. We may suffer ramifications for their decisions for years and years to come.

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Matt Foley Newbie

Matt Foley

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The perennial playoff teams (New England, Indy, Pittsburgh, San Diego, Giants, Eagles) all have franchise quarterbacks. This should have been addressed in the draft years ago. Look at all the first day busts the Panthers have had the past five years. Any one of those picks could have been used on an heir for Jake.

You build your team around the most important position. At least, you do if you want to make the playoffs more than once every four or five years.

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Kurb Newbie

Kurb

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The perennial playoff teams (New England, Indy, Pittsburgh, San Diego, Giants, Eagles) all have franchise quarterbacks. This should have been addressed in the draft years ago. Look at all the first day busts the Panthers have had the past five years. Any one of those picks could have been used on an heir for Jake.

You build your team around the most important position. At least, you do if you want to make the playoffs more than once every four or five years.

Show us the person you replace a bust with.

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