The trades

We want to run the ball and haven't been able to find a guy to run in since Davis. Having Stewart and Williams is the best thing that ever happened to Carolina and Madden. We have the 1st or 2nd best RB tandom in the league and Williams could be considered a top 5 RB by himself.

 

If we had passed on Stewart we could have kept our first rounder in 2009 and our second rounder in 2008. Would DW backed up by Matt Forte not work for you?

If we had taken Otah at 13 and kept our picks we could have taken Matt Forte at #43 and not lost a whole lot. Then we could have taken Brown at 28 this year and kept our first rounder in 2010. We could have taken Evander Hood at 28 and still traded for the pick to get Brown in the second round.

Stewart is a good player but we could have gotten more out of the pick we used to draft him.

 

yeah, there's no knowing now whether we'll finish high or low. I know how I felt about last year's trade (guardedly optimistic but feeling like we gave up a ton) and can compare that against this one (which feels like we got a lot more value, and we weren't as eagerly calling every pick after our own trying to get a trade).

 

Love hindsight.

 

This season

 

Agreed.

But i always thought it would be interesting to see how the Stewart/Otah pair would compare to the Williams/Forte pair in Chicago. Forte was great, but Williams had his fair share of injuries. Otah trumps Williams.

It was nice to see Williams break out last year too. While many had hoped he would i doubt many thought it'd be so stellar. No fumbles either remember.

Lets just be thankfull things a back on track here in Carolina.

 

It's great, but in this case people were saying the same thing at the time.

 

I know I was saying that we did not need a running back in the first round. I did not know DW would break out as big as he did but I thought he would be a very solid feature back.

 

It was still hindsight. When we were sitting on the clock at #13, there was no way to know with 100% certainty that Forte would still be available at #43. We wanted and got a second starting calibre RB with no question that we upgraded from Foster.

 

I still think using the #13 overall pick for a running back to back up DW was too expensive. There are plenty of guys out there who are good enough to be a solid back up running back and who can be signed pretty cheaply. Now that we have Stewart and he has proved to be a solid player it all worked out pretty well but the fact remains that DW was and is enough to be our feature back.