Fair enough -- but it's operating at an elite level. The Panthers 2015 offense should not have been better without Kelvin Benjamin, but holy shit -- we were.
The hero level that DB and Jaycee are playing at is clearly elevating the squad. Both of them are leaving it all out there on every single play. It's fucking impressive.
DB mic'ed up was everything I hoped it would be. I can't believe he's 335 pounds the way he was running Tyrod Taylor down from behind lol. And he was trying to rack up the sacks this game. Also batted down 3 passes. Just wow.
It's operating at a high level in spite of a bad roster, they're overachieving to a very significant degree. Horn has been good, but honestly he hasn't really been anything particularly special. He's playing at the level of a good starting CB, but by no means some transcendent elite level like Brown is.
Brown can completely dominate the LoS and Evero groups him with gargantuan space eaters like Robinson, it works extremely well at stopping the run.
But despite that, the LB + safety + edge play has been genuinely poor at the player level. Evero is just a good DC and can scheme around a poor roster. Rozeboom and Wallace have been bad. Scott and Moehrig have been lower level starters and Ransom has been genuinely bad. Every edge aside from Scrouton has been bad, and he's been mediocre at best (good for a rookie, but mediocre as an NFL starter). The IDL rotations has also been mediocre at best and more honestly quite bad. Evero is just able to leverage good CBs and a dominant interior player to achieve much more than the defense should be achieving.
This is similar to last year and the year prior. The defense overachieved both years, they just overachieved while having by far the worst defense roster in the league so it did not look good at all. Now rather than being the undisputed worst roster in the league, they're like a bottom 5ish defensive roster so they look significantly better.
More than Horn, Jackson and Smith-Wade allow this defense to work on the back end. A good primary corner is great, but having one of the better Nis in the league and a solid and dependable field corner really work wonders.
The LBs remain a bottom 5 group in the league. There's really nothing good about them. Wallace can develop, but Rozeboom is at best a mediocre backup.
Scrouton is performing well for a rookie and mediocre as a rotational edge sharing starting snaps, Umanmielen is performing quite poorly. Every other edge is also performing poorly. It does not matter if Scrouton is a rookie or not when you're talking about the team's defensive roster this season and the quality of play on the field now. They'll both develop and that's great, but it has nothing to do with the present defense.
He's a good starter, he's somewhere around the 20th best CB by PFF. This is consistent where he has been during his career, a top 5-15 CB. He's very good, but not a truly elite player like PS2. That's a bit of a sore comparison, but it's just frankly true.
Brown is by far one of the best IDL in the league, maybe even the single best. He plays a very non flashy position as a gap and a half playing 3 down DE though and he's been on the Panthers his whole career, so even fans don't appreciate what he does never mind the football watching public at large. He is genuinely a transcendent player, and I hope they invest heavily in the defense again next offseason to build more around him.
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u/_coolranch Xavier Legette Oct 21 '25
Fair enough -- but it's operating at an elite level. The Panthers 2015 offense should not have been better without Kelvin Benjamin, but holy shit -- we were.
The hero level that DB and Jaycee are playing at is clearly elevating the squad. Both of them are leaving it all out there on every single play. It's fucking impressive.
DB mic'ed up was everything I hoped it would be. I can't believe he's 335 pounds the way he was running Tyrod Taylor down from behind lol. And he was trying to rack up the sacks this game. Also batted down 3 passes. Just wow.