Happy Half Hour Episode 147: Post Blizzard

This week on a Happy half Hour.

The one thing I can tell you for sure about Dan Morgan, if he tells you he's gonna draft the best player available.

Regardless of position, believe him.

Dan is one of those guys who is going to trust that board. He's going to see what it's telling him and he's just gonna follow it.

What's up, Cow, It's.

Time for the Happy Half Hour, presented by Southern Star, an official bourbon of the Carolina Panthers. Here are your hosts, Darren Gant and Cassidy Hill.

Hello friends, and welcome to a post blizzard edition the Happy Half Hour.

Have we all survived or we're all here?

There was a little bit of ice in the grass outside of my porch.

D L's in the room podcast, Matt is safely behind the monitors.

You're here, I'm here. We seem to have made it. We survived.

My parents in Mobile, Alabama got seven inches.

See, I think to my thing on this is, if it's this cold for this long you only get a half inch of snow, That's that's mean. That's spiteful on somebody's part. So good for your parents for being able to enjoy it in Mobile in suburban mobile Alabama.

That's my thought process. When it's like starting to thunder and it gets humid, just rain, Like, don't be obnoxious about it. Just rain.

Yeah, you're new here in the Carolinas, aren't you.

I was gonna say, you come from Alabama where they actually got snow.

Previously, you lived in Green Bay.

Where there is right now where it snows like starting in September and ending in May or something. You know, so you've got to be treating this whole thing your first good Charlotte blizzard as.

Come on that.

I was running around yesterday running some errands and there was no one on the road, not a thing, like maybe two other people on the interstate when I went to my hair appointment. And I get to the hair appointment and the lady's like, yeah, a lot of people didn't come in today. And I was like, you know what's so funny is I have a car that I bought when I lived in Wisconsin because I didn't know how to drive in the snow when I first got there.

Wow, I just drove. Yeah, I stayed at home.

I was out in it a little bit Tuesday night when it started covering the roads and I had to drive a grand total of about five blocks back to my house. And at one point I was the only car on a particular street, and just because I'm a jerk, I jammed on the brakes just to see what would happen, and I slid a little bit.

It wasn't dramatic.

Everyone is safe, but at that point I was just like, Yeah, there's nothing for me out here in this world. I'm just gonna park, going to house, have a glass a eggnog or something, and call it a night. Speaking of which, we were neglectful coming out of the top of the podcast.

We got distracted quick, my bad.

This is the Happy Half Hour Prevented, presented by our friends at Southern Star, an official bourbon partner of the Carolina Panthers celebrate the spirit of the Carolinas, which Matt might have to take that out and put it back at.

The top at some point.

But a blizzard edition of The Happy Half Hour presented by our friends at Southern Star, an official bourbon partner at the Carolina Panthers celebrate the spirit of the Carolina.

Does reading it twice make up for not reading it at the top?

Yeah, maybe it does.

Matt's gonna work his podcast magic on this when it make us sound professional. But yeah, as Matt, yeah, there you go, there you go. So you're probably pro blizzard, right.

I love a good snow day. I if I have an excuse to not have to leave the house and don't have to tell me twice, I'll light a candle. I like to have the house clean for this, So if I know a snow day is coming, I'll clean the night before so that I can just sit and enjoy. I'll light a candle, I'll make some soup, and then I usually will turn on like one of about five different entertainment things. I'll either turn on Lord of the

There you go.

I you know I tend to my main thing on snow days is I like to prepare in advance, right, Thank the boy Scouts for that. When I grew up in it, I lived it. Yes, I was an Eagle Scout the whole nine yards. So be prepared has kind of been instilled in me from an early age, and.

I take it to ridiculous extreme.

So in advance of Charlotte blizzards, I'm that guy who goes to Harris Teeter.

Now, I don't go crazy with the bread and milk.

That's a cliche and I avoid cliches as often as possible.

So instead you get just at whatever.

I feel like cooking.

And it may be you know, it's oftentimes suit, but a lot of times it's just whatever wife and I feel like cooking. Whatever we feel like eating, will buy a bunch of that, and I just cook for days and days and days.

So when we get a blizzard to like this week's blizzard.

That's gone by the middle of the next afternoon, No, it's a Charlotte blizzard.

I mean, we hadn't had snow here.

Get humor us, Okay, we hadn't had snow in over three years in any measurable amount.

So I did get one blizzard when I lived in Green Bay or what classified as a blizzard. Do you know how much?

What's a Green Bay blizzard?

I went out and measured it and at one point we were up to eighteen inches.

Holy cat, foot and a half. A foot and a half's a lot of snow.

That was a lot of snow. That was pretty much overnight.

Yeah, I still remember.

Somebody went to work the next day. It was crazy. What do you people do with?

This is how you can tell I'm an old because I start these stories with.

I remember back in the winter of ninety three, we had.

A blizzard in Alabama in ninety three, the Great Blizzard.

The Great Blizzard, I mean, listen, the Great Blizzard of ninety three hit during my spring break of my second senior year in college.

Was in March.

It was March, so spring break I had come off the mountain and spring break got extended two weeks.

That year the mountain. John couldn't get back up the mountain.

I mean it was there was over a foot of snow in suburban Hickory, which is only an hour away from Boone and you couldn't get back to Boone proper. So everybody got a nice two week spring break that year. But I still the elders speak of the blizzard.

In the Blizzard of ninety three is actually one of my first, like real core memories as a child, like I was. I was three years old, and it's not like I can remember a lot of it, but the one thing I remember about it. So we lived in Birmingham and we got a good bit of snow. Obviously, my cousin Daniel was born during the Blizzard of ninety three.

That's a good story.

Yeah, But we were at my Aunt Dot's house, my gret my great aunt's house in Bessemer home with Jameis Winston and my Aunt Dot, and we knew snow was coming, but nobody knew it was going to be that bad. This part my parents had filled in over the years. So we got stuck at my Aunt Dot's house for three days. And when we went back home, my parents had put our dog in the house because they just knew it was going to be cold. But we were thinking we'd be back home that night. Well we would

That's amazing.

If my dad goes into checks. She never once messed in the house the whole three days she had held it, held it for three days.

See, that's a good dog.

Right, that's a very good dog. She was a good dog. And I just remember standing there on the front porch and watching her go get in that snow for twenty minutes.

That also means that Lady didn't eat for three days.

I know.

It was awful.

We felt so bad, but we had no idea we were gonna get stuck.

See.

I had my favorite dog ever. I had an old beagle named mister Bean. And I could leave mister Bean at home alone for like four hours and he would get into something. Yeah, I mean he was a beagle. He sniffed thing. So if there was ever loose food in one of my you know, in my work bag, if there was ever a granola bar or something in side pocket, he ate zippers out of my work bags to get to food that was inside the back. When

He would have eaten.

He would have been fine. He would have found food. You know, I wonder if.

Lady found food. And I just obviously was not old enough to remember that part of it. I should ask my parents.

Mister Bean was bad about like if I ever had a bag of potatoes sitting on the floor of the pantry or something, he would eat a raw potato.

Yeah.

So, at any rate, So now we've covered blizzards and and dog stories. Dogs and blizzard stories. Good dogs, They're all. They're all good dogs. But at some point we got to talk about football. It's in our contract. You you mentioned watching football. I've got a weird thing and and I have done this for a long time. I love the game of football. Let me just say this right out at the top.

An interesting wild card weekend.

I work very hard to avoid football, and I only and I only watch football if I think it's going to be good, because wild card weekend is usually bad football fun. So so last weekend was the weekend where I re engage with the football industrial complex. Because after an eighteen game regular season or an eighteen week regular season. Darren needs a break, all right, Darren needs to turn off for a minute and not football for a second.

That's the good stuff.

So I was like, everybody else in America is like, take this Baltimore Buffalo game and shoot it straight into my vans.

I need more of that.

In my life, and you wat, I saw parts of that. When things that happened late at night are often lost on me, but I did see the end of that one. Hats off to our old friend Jeremy Chen. Yeah, he's definitely a friend of the program. We're very happy for Jeremy and Frankie Luvu that they're enjoying success in Washington both.

Yep, no doubt.

And I just think though that that I thought that Buffalo Baltimore game. I don't know about you, but I kind of approach that as well, there's your super Bowl, the rest you'll just figure it out.

I approached it the same way, and I was slightly disappointed that I felt like it wasn't as good of a game as we were should have gotten, and it was purely because of Baltimore mistakes. Granted, it was still a close game up until the very very end, because you know Baltimore is good enough to overcome some of those mistakes. It almost makes you wonder, well, of course, it makes you wonder, like without those three mistakes, does

It didn't help. Yeah, and that's Mark Andrew's heart.

By the way, I know such a good player and I hate that this is what's gonna get remembered.

Well, the good news about it is it happened in Buffalo, and the Buffalo fans, who you know, I tease the Buffalo fans, most of whom live in Charlotte now, And they came and never went back. Nobody ever, other than Brandon Bean and Sean McDermott, no one has ever moved from Charlotte to Buffalo. They're the only ones. They blazed that trail and took some of their old friends with them. But the Buffalo fans respond to stuff like this. They've

I love that their pettiness is still kind. Yeah, so Buffalo of.

Them, Yeah, it's nice.

I mean it's almost a menace, o'de a nice kind of thing, But yeah, I do like that about them.

Yeah yeah, fun fan base. And I will say this, Baltimore I thought was one of the best teams in the NFL this year. That was kind of who I wanted to see make it to the super Bowl, just to kind of put a cap on all they've done

Now, all of the times, all of the time, all of the times, every time, I mean at three of the last four years. I think it was because I remember looking that up when they traded in the draft and Buffalo traded the pick that turned into Xavier Worthy, you know, to the Chiefs, and I was like, why would you give a speed receiver to the team that knocked you out of the playoffs three of the last four years, So that part of it baffled me.

And the Chiefs are doing their Chiefs things. They're getting super strong.

And they've now reached that point that the Patriots used to occupy. In my head, I was the idiot who for a while said, this is the year the Patriots finally fall off the cliff.

They can't keep doing this forever.

And then they kept doing it, and they kept doing it, They kept winning and they've just kind of reached that point. I almost assume Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes are going to win until they don't, and even then, even when they don't, I'm gonna assume they're going to come back and win the next year too.

I mean, they've just kind of reached that point.

I agree that Buffalo is probably the better team over the course of this season. You know, we had a good up close look at the Chiefs and it reminds me a little bit of what happened he in twenty fifteen. Uh, it's the worst nine and oh team I've ever seen. This is the worst ten and oh team I've ever seen. This is the worst fifteen to one team I've ever seen.

Right. They find their ways, and I'm sure people would say part of that is because of help, and we can talk about that later, but they find ways. When you're a defense and you're letting Travis Kelcey get between you and just sit in a soft part of the zone, he's gonna beat you. Every time he's somebody said the other day and they're so true. He has reached that point of his career where he now just outslows everyone else around it.

That's my goal. I want to outslow somebody, and.

That's where he's at and he's doing it well. And you can't let Travis Kelce and Patrick Mahomes figure out that they're really really good together. And that's exactly what happened the other day against the Texans. That being said, I do want to ask you a question about this. Yeh Do you think let me provese it by saying this, I can't really blame Patrick Mahomes for using the rules to his advantage when they can do so. He's just playing the game the way it was set up to be played.

Yep.

Do you foresee a world where some of these rules are changed in response to how he is playing the game. As far as the sliding, the fake sliding, the flopping out.

Of bounds, well, I mean flopping ad bounds fake slide. I mean you can penalize somebody for a fake slide I mean, or just the thing that I think is never gonna happen, is the league's gonna make it easier to hit quarterbacks. That's not a thing Big Shield's ever gonna do.

So I don't foresee roughing the passer ever going.

Back, right, I mean, it's not ever going to go back to the old days where Dan Fouts was being carried off on a stretcher after no. I mean, I'm just saying people of his era had to take shots that guys these days never have to experience.

But I don't fault him for it. I mean he's found the edge.

Yeah, that's and that's the name of the game, especially when you get to this point in the playoffs when there's four teams left, find that small edge, and that's how they maintain that level. It's how the Patriots maintained that level for a long time. You know, Tom Brady was Tom Brady, but Bill Belichick was good at finding that little thing that he knew and you didn't, right, And you know that's what great ones do. So I

They don't run enough. Yeah, a pass is a wasted play. And listen.

Aj Brown is a brilliant player, and he's leading book clubs, and I support literacy, so I'm pro aj Brown here. If there's ever been a team that should run more, it's that one. And you've over complicated it, Sirianni. You've you've made this harder than it needed to be. You've got that offensive line, and you've got Saquon friggin Barker. Turn around and hand it to that man, even when Hurtz was dinged up and wasn't as mobile as he usually is. Just turn around and hand it to big Boy,

I have said this ahead of the Eagles last like three games, and this is not in any way to toot my own horn. It's just to prove I don't think everybody is watching the Eagles as closely as they think they have until it comes time to end a game like this. The Eagles, and I think I saw this when we went there to play them. They have a passing game that has some superstars and AJ Brown and DeVante Smith. They do not have a passing game

I think it could. I don't know.

I don't know that Jalen Hurts is the quarterback to necessarily do it. I mean, yeah, you look at I mean, give Patrick Mahomes, AJ Brown and Devontae Smith right, and see what happen happens, and that still looks a lot different. And that's no slight. You know, Hurts has figured out his lane. He's figured out how to make it work as good as what he does.

He just needs to be allowed to do what he does. Yeah, and she's only throwing one downfield down twenty yard pass a game.

That's fine, and that might be too many. Just do nothing but run, I just I I. The games that stick out into my mind often are the ones that are weird for one reason or another and include a lot of running, because I do like a short football game.

We almost got to score a gomi this past weekend, but then somebody, oh the Chiefs, yep, and then they took the safety.

And that once I figured out how to find score agami on the internet, that changed a lot of stuff for me, because every now and then you just see random scores and wait for somebody. Our old friend young Will I would be like, young Will, is this score gomi?

And he would where did you find it? I just wait for somebody to tweet it.

Yeah, it's there's an inn.

There's a website that's got Yeah, it's got the whole graft On there so you can look to every possible value, see it's either filled in or not, and it'll give you the games played and all that kind of stuff. So fun with Scoregami. But I do love a good two and a half hour football game, and I think about I think about Christmas Eve two thousand and six more often than I ever should, not because of warm

I stationed Zebra. It's the worst ever.

I lose sight of the differences in degrees once it reaches a certain point. But when the Lions came in here the other year and the Carolina Panthers run for three to twenty, yeah, I mean Deontay Foreman, I think was one sixty five two but one twenty five and you know, hung thirty seven points on the lines and kept that, you know, playoff push alive in twenty two. So those are the kind of games that stick out into my memory. That's why I was secretly hoping for

And Sequon Barkley versus Derrick Henry would have been fun to watch. Man's talk about Lamar Josh. Let me get see Saquon versus Derrick Henry.

That's old man, Hey.

Speaking of Detroit, I thought about Detroit a lot during our blizzard, as one does. While I was watching their coordinators go on and become head coaches all over the NFL. Ben Johnson finally took a job. Aaron Glenn gets the Jets job. Best of luck to both of those guys. But the main thing that kept running through my mind was, ain't me right?

Don't have to do with a courage and search this year.

No coaching search for this kid this year.

And I was just sitting there on the couch yesterday watching it not snow anymore and again, if it's going to be this cold for this long and it's no more snow than we got, and that's hateful. I was just thinking how fortunate the Carolina Panthers are to be in this position where on January twenty second and twenty third, nobody's talking about them.

A friend called me on my way in today and he was like, what are you doing. I said, I'm heading to work and he said, Cassidy, it's eleven forty Jake, I don't have to deal with the coaches search this year. I'm going in when I want to.

And that's that's not only good for me and you, that's good for the product here because for the first time in a long time, the Carolina Panthers are in a spot where they can build year after year, and that's just gonna help in so many ways. I mean, you still see, you know, most of the people are out of the building. You'll still see some of the coaches and some of the injured guys coming in for

Yeah. And as we've said a few times now, being able to have so many people on the same timeline in the same window is mixed for an exciting time and excited to see what next year could bring.

Yeah.

And I was gonna say, and before you know it, it's going to be back into off season mode. I mean, you're going to Mobile next week Senior Bowl kicks in. Dan and Dave will celebrate their one year anniversary together.

Could we get them a gift?

We should or one year's paper, right, yeah, one year's paper. We should print out Panthers dot Com and present it to them or something. But no, those guys are going to be right back to work. Next week scouting and getting ready for and it's on.

And then we'll be heading to East West here in the next day or two.

Yep, Dan's head to the East West.

I know, uh, he'll join Dave down in Mobile at some point. And then it's on because then you go straight from the the All Star Games, the Combine, free agency and its own. Yeah, and it's on for the next couple of weeks. So the good news is we've had our opportunity to rest during the blizzard.

Right but thank god we had that blizzard so we could get an app. I'm excited about this year leading up to the draft as well, because I think we're in a fun position, at least for us. I don't know how the scouts feel, or Dan and Day feel, but for me and you, it feels like a fun position. It's not high enough where it feels inevitable of who it will be. There's still a little bit of mystery there, but it's still in the top ten, so you know

Yeah, no doubt about that.

The one thing I know for sure, and we've got all spring to talk about, you know, draft prospects, this, that and the other. The one thing I can tell you for sure about Dan Morgan, if he tells you he's going to draft the best player available.

Regardless of position, believe him.

Okay.

I think Dan is one of those guys who is going to trust that board. He's going to see what it's telling him and he's just going to follow it to the letter.

I mean.

And the Panthers honestly aren't a spot where, you know, if the right receiver is there, they can't say no to that.

If the right whatever I mean.

Pass rusher is obviously going to get a lot of attention, Defensive lines obviously going to get a lot of attention.

You know who I'm really excited to kind of look into, and I don't admittedly know enough about him to know where he is projected. I'll kind of find this more out in Mobile next week, but after watching that National Championship game, I'm really excited to see Xavier Watts at the Senior Bowl. He's a Notre Dame safety. He was one of the few bright spots on Notre Dame's defense

You just described him as a good little safety and then I know it.

A good little safety is like the way a girl would say it, like that's the good yo. He's such a cute little thing. Oh okay, you know, like a puppy.

So anyway, all right, Well, we will get in depth into all the pre draft stuff in future editions, but for now, we've covered the blizzard, We've covered the playoffs, championship game week in tune in next week we'll break down the pre super Bowl stuff.

You may be on the road. We'll have to we'll figure out, we'll figure out the scheduling and all that.

Matt recorded our entire conversation about the ocean before we got started, and we can.

Just roll in and just run that in.

Just remember, folks, the sea is a road game. Nothing good happened happens for you there.

Take that.

Be prepared for the next blizzard, which may come and it may not.

I have no idea.

I'm gonna put a snow machine in your front yard

And we'll see you next week on the Happy Half Hour.