Spoiled Season

certainly, developing a QB is a viable strategy and one that Fox has stated directly or indirectly (can't source it right now anyway) he's not direly interested in. Moore will probably be that first exception if the staff has time, but I don't think it was necessarily by design. He just came available and worked out well. I hope he does, of course, but it's not necessarily dire if he doesn't. You can find a viable guy in free agency that already has experience that might not have the weight of expectation, and you certainly can in the right situations draft a good fit and have him learn a while. There's no one way, and to be honest we haven't had much opportunity other than Collins to have a stable situation to develop a guy. Since then, only now have we had a stable QB situation, and that's been beset with injuries the last two years.



I really don't believe in handing anything out. That's my only concern with a draft pick high enough to garner that necessity. I don't think anything "of the future" is really guaranteed so there's not a ton of reason to guarantee it. Hell, at this point if I were running a generic franchise, I'd have two vets and two draft picks 3rd-5th fighting out for three spots if there were a problem.

 

The entire point of the Carr comments I got bashed for last season was specifically to dispel the idea that Jake's absence alone explained why we sucked. The team struggled in a lot of areas, not just quarterback, but while I expected a lot of fans to just think that having Jake healthy would have made the '07 Panthers a great team, I didn't expect that kind of nonsense out of Fox. Losing Jake badly hurt the offense, but by that point we had beaten a team that started 0-8, gotten blown out at home by Houston, and were tied 17-17 with a shitty Falcons team. I'm glad that Hurney at least realized the team had more problems and tried to address some things in free agency.

 

Losing Jake was obviously not the only reason this team sucked last year but I do think it would have been a playoff team if he had been healthy. He was playing some of the best football of his career. The offense would have likely gotten better as the season wore on. Houston did give us a beat down but they were looking pretty solid before all the injuries hit them.

Still though we had no pass rush last year, no viable #2 wide out and the offensive line could not get any push for the running game. I doubt Jake would have solved any of those although a better passing game might have opened up the running game a bit without the OL getting any push.

 

Jake gone wasn't the only reason and we just weren't a tough or consistent team. Carr does suck, though.

 

No way. Again, with Jake we struggled but won against a team that didn't win a game until Week 10, got blown out at home by a mediocre Texans squad, and were tied with the Falcons in the third quarter. As B&B said, we might have been the worst 7-9 team in history. We gave up 80 more points than we scored last year (267-347), which was a worse point differential than anyone in the NFC except Atlanta, San Francisco, St. Louis, and Detroit.

 

Even Jake suggests he may not have been able to cure the problems that got us to underperform. There certainly was a leadership vacuum, and anytime you have this many quarterbacks playing/injured it's not going to help. There was no one thing, there were plenty. The offense wasn't consistent, the run game was getting yards but not doing a lot with it, the defense took weeks to get going and wore down quick, not to mention the awful pass rush and the lack of getting off the field on 3rd downs.

I feel better about most of the above for this year including leadership and personnel, and this team seems to have some specific, transparent goals. Whether it's truly tougher, whether the locker room problems are truly gone, I guess we'll see.

The idea of us being the worst 7-9 team ever isn't something I'd be willing to quantify, but oddly enough that does kinda parallel the idea that Fox stated he was proud of the team for doing as well as they did, in a way. I don't really think they deserved to finish 7-9, either, but they did eventually get it back together and fought some tough games when they could've (continued to?) quit.

 

It is both enlightening and a bit scary to learn about the internal issues that hurt this team last year. Sure we had injuries and that can't be dispelled. I say scary because it is the job of the coach to get through that, I guess his argument is that we did with a 7-9 season... I think it is probably important to realize/know what limitations there were to change the team's chemistry problems during the course of the season.

I hope that the staff correctly identified all of the cancerous personalities this off season and handled them accordingly. I guess at this point we have to trust that that is the case and assuming Smith can keep his head on strait and Jake can stay healthy we might be ok after all, but at this point I am not sold on the 08 Panthers and like Collin have never been a fire Fox guy but I am getting restless with this staff.

 

Fire Crossman and all will be well...

 

that's one thing about it, right or wrong, is they didn't push any staff out to try to make themselves look better. They could've easily just dismissed some people and said that's what the problem was, but I don't think it was overall.

The only one that realistically made sense to go was Crossman, but they could've easily dumped Trgovac and others and been able to justify it, right or wrong. Other than him, I believe in general we have quality coaches overall - since it came up and I've been a champion of the ideal, I'd certainly rather have a QBs coach that has experience coaching up players, but Fox doesn't have a lot of patience for such a thing so I'm not sure it'd matter that McCoy doesn't. The end result is that if McCoy can help gameplan and prepare a QB, I guess he's doing his job, which is half of the position.

I don't know if I'd agree that his "passing coordinator" title is necessary, earned, or that he did a good job of it, but while the passing game was the worse of the two parts of the offense I'd have to defer to this year to see how things go. It's not fair to estimate his abilities on such a disaster.

 

Couple of thigns that standout to me:

Losing your QB, who - for better or for worse - has been by far the most consistent leader the franchise has ever had.

Losing your disliked backup QB and having an undrafted rookie who spent camp with another thing takeover.

Vinny Testaverde being considered a solid option. Beer goggles there.

Not having a #2 wideout.

Not having a #3 wideout.

Peppers having some sort of problem that was probably a rampant STD treated with massive quantities of IV antibiotics that destroyed his stamina.

Ryne Robinson sucking cock.

Foster having the suck.

Jenkins having the suck.

Hartwig having the suck.

Wahle having the suck.

Sucking cock at home.

I think all that happened. I think losing Delhomme - regardless of ability or talent - could easily have brought morale down a notch or 5. Moore was not as talented as Jake, but his presence boosted morale enough to give us some success.

I think we'd have had alot less problems if Delhomme had been healthy.