This week on a Happy Half Hour.
Fans were conditioned to seeing their starters for a quarter in the first game, and a half in the second game, and then into the third quarter in the third game. Those days are over as teams get more and more involved in other ways to get their preseason work in without putting their quarterback at risk.
Touchdown. Cow wha, It's time for the Happy Half Hour presented by Southern Star, an official bourbon of the Carolina Panthers. Here are your hosts, Darren Kant and Cassidy Hill.
Hello, friends, and welcome to another edition of the Happy Half Hour presented by a Southern Star, an official bourbon partner of the Carolina Panthers. Celebrate the spirit of the Carolinas a little Southern Star. No editorial comment about the need for Southern Star after preseason game one. We'll just kind of leave that one where it is. I feel compelled by union rules that we have to discuss that a little bit.
I guess sure, probably not too much like ten words.
Yeah, hit me with your best.
Now, I got to come up with ten words.
I've got a few, expect.
Yeah, did in parts? That's three?
Yeah, you're like writing haiku on your fingers over here. You're counting out syllables.
Encouraging back up secondary. Okay, slow offense, no starters, Yeah, okay, how about this.
I don't know how many of this is. I'm just going to say it, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain or the man in front of the curtain or the curtain. I truly decided about an hour and a half before that game kicked off, when we put out the list of inactive players who weren't going to be joining us during that game was playing. Yeah, I was like, okay, there's not a lot to be learned here tonight, because when the starters on both sides of the ball sit, it really does put a damper
on what you're gonna do. I mean, preseason is always such a mixed bag anyway, because you go into a game not sure what your opponent is going to do. And I don't think anybody fully expected the Patriots to go with this weird quarterback rotation where it's Jacoby Brissett then Drake May for a series, but then Bailey's appy for a long long time. So I mean, it's always
tough to try to get a handle on that. What we saw was not a whole lot of offense, and that is to be expected when you're playing an undrafted rookie quarterback in Jack Plumber and the backup offensive line which was down to five healthy guys by the end of it. So poor ol Brady Christiansen, a former seventeen game starter not that long ago, was out there with undrafted rookies and it was just a real mixed bag of stuff. So I know it's been a long time
and everybody was excited to see football. It's just that that wasn't it.
If you ever read that Obi Keeler game story says I thought I knew a football wise, but how I don't think I do.
Yeah, it was confusing. There was a lot of that going around. But I mean that's kind of the danger of the preseason, and that's the way this thing is going. More and more. I think the old days where fans were conditioned to seeing their starters for a quarter in the first game, and a half in the second game, and then into the third quarter in the third game, those days are over. That's gone and it ain't coming back. As teams get more and more involved in other ways
to get their preseason work. In without putting their quarterback at risk. I think a lot of teams are trying to go to that. I did a little journalism and realized that of the thirty two teams in the NFL, seventeen of them did not play their starting quarterbacks last week,
opting for safety rather than anything you'll judge. I mean, really, when you look at the list of the teams that did, I know, fans have been you know, or a certain segment of the fan base, and we'll get to that later, but a certain segment of the fan base is like, well, Patrick Mahomes played, Josh Allen played, Josh Allen was two of three for twenty two yards before leaving for the safety of the bench area. So what did Josh Allen really learn?
Are the Buffalo Allen had has like a completely new wide receiver course, right?
And so did we learn that much more about Josh Allen in those three very short pass attempts. I don't think we did, so I understand and listen self awareness. I appreciate everybody being so passionate about professional football. It has helped me create a comfortable life from me and my family, and I am grateful for that. But being
too invested in what happens in August. Professional football is probably not wise because it's less and less resembling actual professional football, so let's weigh it accordingly.
You also have more and more joint practices, More teams are going to that it's something that the Panthers are doing this week, and you have seventeen games. You never ever want to say it's okay to lose a game, but you have a little more wiggle room in the regular season now to get the rust off, to get
the gears going. It hurts when you're opening your season against a divisional opponent because you never ever want to drop one of those games, but you do have a little bit more wiggle room in the regular season to kind of figure things out, so to speak.
Yeah, yeah, And I'll be honest with you. Maybe it's just that I've been doing this for thirty years and seeing a lot of bad preseason football over the years, But it doesn't matter all that much in the big scheme of things. And to your point, our joint practices are a better way to get your work in because here's what Dave Canalis and Robert Salah have done in planning the joint practices that will begin tomorrow here Bank
of America Stadium with the New York Jets. They'll get together and they'll say, for instance, and I haven't seen to Mar's practice script, they can say, all right, let's do twelve plays of red zone, and then let's do twelve plays of move the ball two minute, and then let's do twelve plays of live run with our ones against our ones. They can plan exact scenarios and repeat them. And it's a better practice situation when you know you're getting twelve plays back to back of X or Y
or whatever it happens to be. In a game, if your undrafted rookie quarterback hurls an eighty yard touchdown pass, that might be all the work you get in that quarter, and then you know, it changes the entire dynamic of the game. I mean, the game situations are unpredictable in an actual game, So you can predict the work, you can control the work, and most importantly, you can put a red jersey on your quarterbacks. And that's the absolute biggest thing. I mean, no one is suggesting that poor
JJ McCarthy in Minnesota suffered the meniscus injury. That's going to end his rookie season before it began in a game. He was hurt in a game, but you know, you can never predict when those things are going to happen. But the Vikings probably wish he would have not done that in the preseason opener. So I think coaches indifference to trying to get scheduled work and really finally tuned, calibrated work with their opponents and protecting their quarterbacks. It's pointing in that direction.
Coaches are creatures of habit and anything they can control they will favor, and that is what a practice is versus a game.
Right, so you know, practice script versus unpredictable game. That's an easy choice for these guys. But still, I do think it's going to be an interesting day of work against the Jets. And one of the funny things to me is that's gotten a lot of attention in joint practices in the past. That second day. You know, that's when you see guys get sick of each other and they know they're not your own guys, and coaches always
talk about take care of our own people. So we've seen big fights break out that joint practices in the past, usually there on the second day. So I think it's smart for Salah and Canalis to get together and say, let's just do this this one day and head that off the pass and Shaq Thompson got love him the conscience of that locker room. He nailed it today when we asked him about joint practices in general.
Honestly, I'm old head, So hopefully ain't no fighting because you still got a practice, you know what I mean. Regardless of the fighting and stuff like that. I just want to come out here, good, good work. We're going against a Hall of famer. It's great for the team. It's great for the young guys to go out there and see a Hall of Famer practice, see how he throws the ball, see how he makes his checks and
stuff like that. So we just got to come out here and play our brand of football how we've been doing and just stick to ourselves, limited fights and just get the great work.
I get where Shack's coming from, Darren, But do you, just as someone who has covered this sport for a long time, do you see the benefit of come rang that can be wrought in those moments?
Yeah?
I mean, as long as no way jerk somebody's helmet off their head and bashes an unprotected player or something like that. I mean, when guys get hurt in those fights. That's the danger I think there is. Anytime you're competing your people against somebody else's people, there's a little bit of that to be gained. And you know, again we've
seen it in the last couple of years here. They've done joint practice with the Patriots with the Colts the last couple of years, and there is a bonding element in the simple act of going on the road and especially with teams doing training camp at home, including US now. And I enjoy that and I wasn't sure how I was gonna but I haven't missed my dorm mattress.
Once we can get you one in here in your office and fittle health.
Well, you know, it might help honestly with what's coming into next couple of weeks. But but yeah, I just think that you can build your bonding in a lot of other ways. Guys are when they're competing, they're together, and you see that on the practice field every day, and you know, you just get a chance to do it against somebody else, which always freshens things up. This time of year.
What matchup in this joint practice tomorrow. Are you looking forward to seeing the most.
Well, and I'll kind of steal and we can you know hear from zero everro on this too. I mean, he said it the other day. Aaron Rodgers probably wouldn't have played in a game, but they're going to walk to the line of scrimmage and Aaron Rodgers is going to do his Aaron Rodgers thing where he calls out your play at the line of scrimmage. And if Vero was great talking about the other day, listen to this.
Going against Aaron Rodgers too. Just that level of communication and having to disguise everything and really be on point on what we're doing because any any weakness, anything that's not right, he's going to point it out, and so very invaluable for us.
And sure, when a quarterback like Aaron Rodgers goes to the line of scrimmage and goes chapter and verse through what you're doing, that's what those guys need to see because there are a lot of new pieces on that Panthers defense, as we've talked all off season about them, seeing that in real time is going to be helpful
to them. So I mean, to me, even though he's in his forties, Even though he's a little kooky with some of his off the field stuff, and that's a good word, you know, political activism, and let's just leave it at that. He's still a fascinating football player to watch because of his ability to do what a arrow just described right.
Very very cerebral in that way, and that can be a bigger test than physicality at times for a defense.
And I mean, you know him, you were around him for a couple of years in Green Bay. What's he like on a day to day basis in practice and what do defensive players up there say about going against him on a routine basis in practice.
He's a little bit like a cat toying with a mouse. He kind of likes to amp things up in practice and see what he can get away with, see what he can test a defense with in practice. It was always interesting to watch him at Dvante Adams to other in practice, because they would just go out there and do things that seem to defy the law of physics
just to see if they could. And imagine how frustrating that is if you're a practice squad dB and you're having to go up against the best quarterback wide receiver combo in the game at the time, and they're just they're drawing up plays in the dirt just to see how much they can frustrate you. Yeh. And so he's also got I don't know if this is a fact. I'm sure he would be able to tell us. I don't know if he has an idetic memory, but he's
got something pretty dang close. And I think that comes in play a lot when facing defenses and knowing what they're gonna do and therefore how to pick them apart. It's never a it's never an issue of the mind with him. It's just, you know, can his forty year old body still do what he knows it needs to do because he's always gonna make the right decision?
Sure, and it didn't last year. He's done, I just think. And it's so it's a little bit so And that word gets overused a lot in sports. But thinking back to the Jets coming to Spartanburg last year, Aaron was coming to a new place for the first time. It was going to be new and unique, and it's the best hope the Jets have had in a long long time.
And the Carolina Panthers had a number one overall pick quarterback and a brand new code to everybody thought well of going into the season and just seeing the scene seeing hard knocks, they are documenting the whole thing. I remember going over to take a picture of Bryce and Aaron talking before the practice began, and there's a boom mic hanging over their head for God's sakes, capturing it for the HBO film's footage.
So it was just so.
Wild and from where those teams thought they were going to be on that August day and where both of them ended up when things unfolded the way they did. It's kind of wild to imagine them getting back together in a completely different place physically and metaphorically tomorrow.
So maybe this is the timeline reset they both needed. They jumped the wrong timeline and they had to come back to this spot.
Yeah, is this one of those Marvel things where we're in alternate Spartan Lind like something.
Doctor Strange opened up a different timehold this time and they're going to take the right shot.
Spartanburg too has tall buildings right.
And less peaches.
Oh boy, Cy the peachoid. That's the one thing I have missed about Spartanburg. It's getting a chance to drive by it a time or two.
You only.
It brings a tear to my It truly is an architectural wonder, and your lack of appreciation for it is disturbing at any rate. So so then we've looked ahead to that joint practice. I do think it's worth spending a little bit of time on what we've seen the last two days here and allow me to crawl up on my old man's soapbox, if you will. I think that the way we consume professional football anymore is largely broken.
New communication models that allow anybody to publish. Any fan that gets in the stands and can transmit one clip of one play during one segment of one practice can put something out into the universe that becomes what is almost a conventional wisdom, the only problem being it's neither
conventional nor wise. Practice in training camp is designed to work all this stuff out, And one of the things that's frustrating to me is someone who's charged with putting responsible information about practice out in the universe, is it creates these impressions that everything's broken. Oh my god, it's going to be a disaster. Bryce thinks, you know, I hear this stuff when I get online, and I do my very best to stay out of the comments section.
Some of it's unavoidable. But the one thing that is kind of lost in this instant analysis of one practice snap is some of this is by design. And I think one of the more interesting points that Dave Canalis has made lately is talking about, like in today's practice, there were a couple of interceptions, shy Tuttle jumps up the line of scrimmage, snags one out of the air.
If this happens during the regular season, our social media department photoshops a hamburger on top of the football, like we did with Derrick Brown a couple of years ago. Trust me, it was beautiful. I was there and we're having fun talking about that. The other one was kind of a fifty to fifty ball. I mean, Troy Hill and Adam Thiel and a couple of salty old vets go up and Troy Hill made the play. So it wasn't as if these were abject disasters by Bryce Young
really in either case. I mean, if a defensive lineman bats ball in the air and intercepts it or catches it clean that's kind of a fluke play and in most tellings of the Tail, but Canalis was interesting because obviously he gets asked about the pigs and he kind of broke down what it meant from his perspective.
I mean, turnovers are always just something that we want to continue to look at and say what happened here and just get to the bottom of it. For me, again, the interceptions happen when we're trying, you know, so I have no problem with that. You know, it's if we're not throwing interceptions, we're not trying stuff. We're not trying to make those tight throws. And we know NFL football is tightly played. It's tight throws in particularly with our defense.
The way that those guys are just continuing to hone in. You know, we've been playing against each other a lot. You know, they're taking advantage of those ops. So for me, I don't look too far into it other than just what happened on display, you know, so we can correct it and we can move forward.
So yeah, if you know, it's almost like in race, and they say if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying, if you ain't throwing picks in practice in August. What are you really learning about this thing?
You got to risk it to get the biscuit, Darren.
There you go, risk it to.
Get the biscuit. And I looked up Bryce's numbers from last year, and on first glance, you're like, oh, those are pretty respectable turnover numbers for a rookie in a weird way, especially in a two and fifteen season. They should have been higher. And I'll never forget when I was covering Trevor Lawrence as a rookie and it became pretty clear that the season was a wash, he just started chucking it up there and he took credit for it, not even blame credit. He said, this is on purpose.
He's like, at this point, the rest of this season is about my development and figuring out how fast these windows close and where they are. I don't think that those chances were necessarily taken with Bryce last season. And you know this is the old cliche. You'd rather your quarterback throw those picks in August versus September or October, no question, And I think he needs to figure out what he can get away with, especially if they're going to be getting the ball out as quickly as Dave
Canalis would like him to do. If they're gonna throw it deeper than maybe he did some last season, he's got to know where those spots are, where those windows are, and how these receivers move within those fifty to fifty balls. And so I never necessarily, if they're not egregious, which I don't think either of these two from Wednesday were. If they're not egregious, I never really see an issue with throwing interceptions in practice.
M hm.
And that's essentially what Canal has said as well.
Sure, and I mean again, I've maybe it's because of all the scars I've built up in thirty pre seasons past, but I remember Jimmy Cuson. I know what a bad interception looks like. I know what you know an unfortunate one looks like. And I've seen my share. And it's not that it's not even covering for Bryce, it's just putting it in context and explaining what he's trying to do.
I had somebody on a radio appearance this morning and ask me how Bryce was looking at I was like, Bryce looks like Bryce looks All the things that were true about him at Alabama remain true. He is accurate, he is smart, he knows how he knows how to read a defense and all those things. Now he is learning how to apply that at the NFL level in real time.
And there were struggles last year.
Obviously he's one of many people who need to improve over last year. But I do think to your point, Cass, I mean, learning how to calibrate how high Adam Feeling can get up the ladder on a twenty yard route is important for him to know because you're going to be in those situations this year.
Something else that he did today that Canalis pointed out was his growth on the scramble drills, and almost hesitate to call some of them scramble drills. Technically, technically if he leaves the pocket, not by design, I guess it is a scramble drill, but because of Bryce's ability with his legs and his ability to throw off platforms so well, I don't even think they're thinking of them as a play that fell apart, but just a play that's shifted.
And Canals mentioned today, you know, wanting Bryce to work on those more and more because that is where they feel one if Bryce's strength lies, and we saw him do that twice today wants to Derek Mingo Jonathan Mingo, I'm sorry, all right, Jonathan Mingo.
Erck Mingo is an exciting young prospect.
There we go. I knew, I knew, I knew him from somewhere. One to Jonathan Mingo, one to Terrace Marshall Junior, where he quote unquote scrambled, got out of the pocket and reset himself outside. Actually I think one of them was on the run and then the other one. He reset himself and got what would be considered an explosive play on the stat sheet. And then Canalis mentioned afterwards. You know, that's something I want Bryce to understand, is that if you can by the time, you can still
set up an explosive play. And we saw that a couple of times today. And so from the outside looking in, it looks like, oh, that play fell apart. It didn't go the way it was supposed to. It may have gone exactly the way they wanted it to. And again, you want to figure out what you can get away with in August versus October.
No doubt about it, and you want to do it in as controlled a way as you can.
So look at us come in full circle.
We bring it all bring that joke right back around to the top. So I don't know it's going to be interesting. I mean, we'll have more for you next week. We'll break down that Jets joint practice, will break down whatever happens in that preseason game, And we don't really know who's gonna play in it yet. My suspicion is it's going to be closer to you know, Canal said today he did want to get guys sometime in the
preseason just to see it. But I don't think he's looking for extended time, and I don't know whether he's looking for it this week or next.
So I think we see some offensive strung.
I think you're going to see some guys at some point. Again, is that Saturday night here against the Jets? Is it next Saturday in Buffalo and a matinee an afternoon in Buffalo? What could be better than that? So we'll look forward to breaking all that down for you next week when we come back on the Happy Half Hour.