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Greg Auman
NFC South Reporter
INDIANAPOLIS — New Panthers head coach Dave Canales, shuttling back and forth between work in Charlotte and his family back in Tampa, said he’s constantly bumping into Bucs fans in airports. Meaning well, they tell him how much Tampa Bay’s offense overachieved in his lone season there.
“I just hate that,” Canales said Tuesday, speaking at the NFL Combine just a month after being hired by the Panthers. “We didn’t overachieve. We maximized what he had. … We rallied around our players and said, ‘This is what we have. How can we maximize this to put us in a position to have success late in the season, to give us a chance to win the division?’”
He might not like the word, but it will be easy for the Panthers to overachieve in 2024. They’re coming off a long season with the NFL’s worst record at 2-15, firing a coach at midyear. Carolina doesn’t have a first-round pick, having sent it to the Bears a year ago in the package that got the Panthers quarterback Bryce Young, taken with the No. 1 overall pick.
But the task of improving on that, on assembling a roster to take the Panthers back in the right direction, that begins in earnest at the combine this week, then next month in free agency and with the draft in April. Carolina struggled on both sides of the ball last year, ranking in the bottom four in points and points allowed, so Canales is aware of how much work there is to do.
He compares the challenge with what he had in Tampa last year, when the cap-strapped Bucs didn’t have a good budget for free-agent additions and used most of their high draft picks on defense. They nailed the quarterback question, getting Baker Mayfield for $4 million and plugged the rest of their offensive holes with frugal signings and rookies.
“We really didn’t make a lot of moves in the offseason,” he said. “We said, ‘OK, boys, this is what we’ve got, so let’s start figuring out a starting point.'”
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Source link : https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/panthers-coach-dave-canales-master-plan-to-revive-team-maximize-bryce-young
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Publish date : 2024-02-27 22:33:59
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