Carolina Panthers poised to stack the deck this offseason
By Alex Duran
The Carolina Panthers need to pick up a good defensive tackle and it might be sooner than expected. However, will they go further than that?
A tumultuous period for the Carolina Panthers football offseason is approaching fast. The patches and plugs for every team’s supposed needs will be receiving calls and making plans for the upcoming season and Carolina will undoubtedly be in the mix to make some big moves.
For the past two seasons Carolina has used free agency to remedy the obvious needs of veteran mentors and talent on their roster by signing players like Torrey Smith and Bruce Irvin. The Panthers have already started down the same path this off-season with an addition of left tackle Russell Okung. Now they have to set their sights on other targets.
The free agent market just became flooded with starting talent all across the board, particularly at the defensive lineman position. The chance that Carolina will find a reasonably-priced plug for their issues on run defense before April just increased drastically (although I believe they’ll still walk away with at least one defensive tackle from this draft).
This works to the benefit of the Panthers as they can shift the draft priority around and find some long-term options to fill the voids left by linebacker Luke Kuechly and (possibly) James Bradberry with the acquisitions of some backfield barracudas in the first and second round. Additionally, the Panthers will avoid breaking the bank for a quarterback and a running back which will leave room to acquire more replacements for their losses this off-season.
It looks like Dontari Poe won’t be returning to the Panthers, so now there’s more cap space to make all of the other necessary moves. The re-signature of Tre Boston could be the beginning of a serendipitous cascade of events if the Panthers play their cards right.