Carolina Panthers: Analyzing the defense before buying into draft hype

We are taking a look at the pre-draft defense for the Carolina Panthers.

Draft season is a special time of year. First is the combine where all of the potential stars of the season get to display their talent and enchant all of their potential suitors. Then there is the player comparison period after the combine and before the draft. We hear all of these names and stats and start to fall in love with the darlings of this or that category. Someone is just destined to come in and make an immediate impact for the Panthers, right?

Not necessarily. It’s easy to get caught up by the bias of your favorite college prospects and forget that this is an annual cycle. More importantly, we forget that while exciting players could come in and make an impact the cycle is about addressing needs. For the sake of semantics, I use the term needs to mean position groups that consistently had underwhelming performances in 2019 and don’t have enough personnel currently in place to make up for it.

There are people currently on the roster who deserve a chance to show their improvement within their own category. Most of them won’t get their chance in the spotlight until training camp where they’ll remind us how they got in this league to begin with, but rest assured everyone will get a look from the new coaches.

This process before the process is warranted by an avoidable situation that befell crestfallen Will Grier supporters who watched Kyle Allen go from zero to hero and then back to zero. The next guy to step up for another position group might already have some tape in Panther blue.

Now that there are some major holes to fill (and some possibly pending) and new coordinators to impress we need to take a closer look at the current host of players before falling in love with new ones.