The Carolina Panthers have closed the book on their 2021 season, which is good, because it was a horrible book that got worse as the pages kept turning, and we all should have put it down long ago, except by then we already had so much time invested in it we kept hate-reading, and when the book finally ended Sunday with a seventh straight loss we wanted to scream at the author “Why did you waste my time!” except that there were about 60 different authors, so it’s no wonder the plot got completely lost in early November, and..
OK, let me slow down a little.
The Carolina Panthers finished 5-12 this past season after starting 3-0. They went 2-12 over their last 14 games. That’s brutal. That’s nasty — although not quite so nasty for owner David Tepper to bring his scythe to work on Monday.
Showing some serious patience for a hedge-fund billionaire, Tepper is allowing coach Matt Rhule and general manager Scott Fitterer to keep their jobs.
Rhule and Fitterer survived the NFL’s “Black Monday” and will be charged with trying to fix what’s broken on a team that has now gone 7-9, 5-11, 5-11 and 5-12 over the past four desultory seasons (all four of those were under Tepper, who bought the team on its way toward the bottom of the standings in 2018).
If Rhule and Fitterer don’t get it done in 2022, one or both almost certainly won’t be around in 2023. I can’t see Tepper being that patient.
So how to fix this team?
The Panthers plan to throw a lot more money and draft picks into the place where they’ve been needing to devote more resources since at least 2016:
The offensive line.
Finally! What took you so long?
You might say both of those things in response to that “fix”, and you would be right.
The Panthers’ offensive line hasn’t been functioning well since Jordan Gross and Ryan Kalil were doing the dirty work inside. The Panthers have needed to address it more thoroughly for years. Instead, in 2021, Carolina decided to stockpile cornerbacks like a survivalist bracing for Armageddon stockpiles cans of beef stew.
So now it’s well past time to overhaul the line, and the Panthers know it, and I just hope they stick to it. Because while solving the offensive line isn’t sexy in the least, it has to be the No. 1 priority for a team that just has too much “leakage,” as Fitterer said Monday in his season-ending press conference.
“We’re not going to be blind to the defense,” Fitterer said. “We’re not going to be blind to the quarterback position. But we absolutely know we have to fix the offensive line. We can’t have all this leakage. ... We need to build this the right way. We need to build this up front.”
So the Panthers’ free-agent money, they swear, will largely be devoted to new offensive linemen. The Panthers’ 2022 draft will also largely be devoted to new offensive — and some defensive — linemen. The Panthers might make a big splash in the quarterback market, or they might not and just see if Sam Darnold will work out better if he doesn’t have people in his face on every other play.
If this sounds a lot like the old Dave Gettleman “hog molly” philosophy, it is. Big men allow you to compete, the former Panther GM often said. And even though football has changed in many ways, and Gettleman retired Monday after an unsuccessful GM tenure with the New York Giants, that part of it hasn’t.
Big men — especially athletic big men — still matter. The Panthers got bullied too often in 2021 because they didn’t have enough of them. It happened mostly to the offensive line, but it happened some to the defense, too, where Carolina’s edge rushers were more suited to rushing the passer than defending the run.
Opposing defenses figured out early that the Panthers couldn’t handle a blitz, and so they just kept doing it. The soon-to-be-named new offensive coordinator will be in charge of a lot of things — including possibly playing Christian McCaffrey more as a slot receiver — but his first order of business will be to fix the protection schemes.
That will be easier with better personnel. The Panthers will keep offensive tackle Taylor Moton and rookie swingman Brady Christensen as starters, most likely, and everything else will be up for grabs.
An offensive line rebuild won’t make for the most exciting offseason. But it will at least give the Panthers a chance to write a better book in 2022.
