Bill Barnwell is Being a Bit Unfair

Bill Barnwell has a column up on Grantland where he decides he wants to pile on the Panthers misery from getting their asses kicked by the Giants on Thursday night. He basically states the Panthers GM, Marty Hurney, isn't as good of a GM as Jerry Reese. Well no shit. Jerry Reese has won two Super Bowls in the last five years, so there aren't many (any) GM's with that specific track record. Then Barnwell states Hurney is incompetent. While much of this criticism can be seen as fair, there are also unfair parts about it. He's playing off the latest game the Panther played mostly and how terribly they played in order to argue his point. Calling Hurney "incompetent" is a bit much when Hurney has been the GM during three playoff appearances, two NFC Championship Game appearances and one Super Bowl appearance. I wonder why he wasn't incompetent when those occurred? Or maybe was incompetent, but the team played well so his incompetence couldn't be seen? Either, he's being a bit unfair in the name of piling on. This column by Barnwell needs some context. Hurney has done an average job, but he isn't incompetent. I can take criticism for saying Hurney paid too much to re-sign the Panthers own players, but at least give him credit for drafting these players. Barnwell refuses to do this. I give Hurney a "C" as a General Manager. I'm not impressed, but I don't know if he should be fired at this point nor do I believe he is incompetent.

It's easy to pile on a team and their architect after a blowout loss, but the nature of how the Panthers lost to the Giants and Hurney's history over the past several years got me thinking about just how incredible Hurney's continued employment is.

Sure, it is easy to pile on right now, but that doesn't mean it isn't fun to do it. Admitting you probably shouldn't be piling on at this point doesn't excuse you from doing so. Also, by focusing on Hurney's last several years is to ignore his good drafts prior to that.

The top priority for most NFL fans is to see their team win a Super Bowl, preferably as quickly as possible. The top priority for most NFL general managers is to hold on to their seat at the GM's table.

How do you hold on to that seat? By winning games and winning Super Bowls. In a way the fans and the GM's goals are truly aligned.

By all accounts, it's a surprise that Hurney's still on the job. The 2-14 season that the Panthers endured during the 2010 campaign should have been enough to get the moving companies working overtime at team headquarters.

Here is a little background that Barnwell doesn't provide in order to give the proper context: Jerry Richardson (Carolina's owner) tore apart the 2009 Panthers team in preparation for the lockout. The Panthers (at the request of Richardson) cut many of their veterans. The 2010 team was a disaster in waiting and turned out to be a disaster on the field. Richardson had Marty Hurney cut costs and cut players in an effort to financially prepare for the lockout. It was a sucky thing to do, but there was an unspoken agreement between the fans, players and the team that the Panthers were going to re-sign their important players after the lockout ended. For now, it was going to suck. I don't like that Richardson did this, but he wanted to change the philosophy of the organization. Throw in the fact John Fox was a lame duck coach whose philosophy no longer matched the philosophy of the front office and the owner, plus he was saddled with players he didn't want or like and was forced to play them, and you have a 2-14 season. If anyone should be fired for that specific season it is Jerry Richardson. Owners rarely fire themselves.

Then Barnwell goes into the Jake Delhomme extension, which was incredibly dumb. I will concede this point. Much of that extension was to take a backloaded deal and free up money to sign Julius Peppers. Jerry Richardson's sons had something to do with this contract (while Richardson was getting a heart transplant they were running the team and they were later essentially fired by their father when he got back) and while Hurney was involved with it, Jerry Richardson's sons were supposedly the ones who helped push it through. Again, I'm not here to defend everything Marty Hurney did. I'm here to defend him from the scathing and unfair parts of this column.

Beyond Delhomme, though, the team was seriously flawed. Hurney had repeatedly dealt future first-round picks to try to move up in the existing year's draft,

He's "repeatedly" done this? Hurney has traded a first round pick a total of two times. I guess theoretically this is a "repeat." He did this in 2009 and 2010. He traded back to get Ryan Kalil and Jon Beason in 2007, which Barnwell ever so conveniently leaves out. Also, in this discussion Barnwell will further criticize the contracts Hurney has given out, yet doesn't acknowledge the players he handed these contracts out to were players Hurney drafted. If Barnwell acknowledged Hurney had drafted good players and re-signed them (to contracts he felt weren't very good contracts), then that would ruin his point that Hurney isn't good at drafting. Fine, criticize the contracts, but give Hurney credit for drafting these players. Barnwell chooses not to do this.

Without a first-round pick in the 2010 draft or cap space because of the Delhomme deal gone wrong, Hurney needed to find contributors in the 2010 draft. Instead, he missed wildly.

Now understanding Delhomme was cut at this point, the Panthers had Matt Moore as their quarterback going into the 2010 draft. He was the guy they thought would be the starter...then he played poorly, got replaced, took over the starting job again and then got hurt. So Hurney was looking for a backup/future quarterback in the 2010 draft for a team that was depleted because the owner was intentionally cutting costs and players. There wasn't a veteran backup available because veteran backups cost money and Jerry Richardson wasn't allowing Hurney to spend any money on a veteran backup quarterback. So when Matt Moore failed, there weren't many backup options available. I find it hard to fault Hurney for this since if it were up to him I imagine he would have signed a veteran backup quarterback.

The team took Jimmy Clausen with the 48th pick and ran him out as the starter far too early,

A little honesty in this writing is all I want. What choice was there to play Clausen? You are John Fox. You have the following quarterbacks on the roster, Matt Moore, Jimmy Clausen, Tony Pike. This is because the owner ordered Delhomme be released and no free agent veteran quarterback signed. Moore had been very bad in his first couple of games and sustained a concussion. Do you start your rookie second round pick (who was supposed to be "NFL ready") or do you start your rookie sixth round pick (who was Tony Pike)? You start Clausen. He was put in a terrible situation and was ruined. I fault John Fox as much as Hurney for this. Fox did nothing to ensure Clausen could succeed, essentially asking him to run the same offense after Week 3 that Moore had taken two years to learn. He was running this offense for a team that essentially was giving up the 2010 season to prepare for the lockout. There is so much blame to go around, but Hurney needed to hit on Clausen and he missed. I would bet 75% of the other NFL GM's would have taken Clausen at #48 and then started him in this situation.

They drafted Brandon LaFell and Armanti Edwards in the third round when the likes of Emmanuel Sanders, Eric Decker, Jimmy Graham, and Aaron Hernandez were available.

I'll give Barnwell Armanti Edwards. He's a bust. But Hurney should have taken Sanders or Decker over LaFell? Is this really an accurate statement? Career numbers for each receiver:

Decker: 59 catches, 825 yards, 9 touchdowns
Sanders: 57 catches, 752 yards, 4 touchdowns
LaFell: 84 catches, 1263 yards, 5 touchdowns

Is there even a comparison? LaFell has clearly been the more productive receiver. I'll even throw in Aaron Hernandez just to see how he compares to LaFell...

Hernandez: 130 catches, 1532 yards, 14 touchdowns

Yes, Hernandez is clearly the superior player to LaFell, but in terms of yards (and remember, Hernandez is a tight end and LaFell is a wide receiver) it is closer than you would think. It is absolutely ridiculous to say Decker or Sanders should have been drafted over Brandon LaFell. I can't emphasize this enough. This criticism and second guessing of Hurney is not only unfair, but factually inaccurate. LaFell has been a better receiver than both Sanders and Decker.

Hurney wasn't able to get rid of the first-round pick that ended up becoming the first overall selection in last year's draft. While the Panthers were lucky to have Cam Newton fall into their lap,

Whoa, whoa. Let's back up a little bit here. Newton "fell into their lap?" When did Newton's success in the NFL all of a sudden become this sure-thing? I remember there being a different feeling around the 2011 draft. Newton wasn't an Andrew Luck kind of prospect and to have him "fall into their lap" took quite a leap of faith in a college zone-read quarterback who supposedly wasn't able to handle NFL playcalling, much less reading NFL defenses. 

Here is a quote about the selection of Cam Newton by the Panthers coming from Bill Barnwell: 

"Every situation is different. But QBs drafted for their arm strength first have failed so frequently that it beggars belief"
-- Grantland's Bill Barnwell

He fell in their lap though. No scouting was necessary on the part of Marty Hurney, right? Easy choice at #1 overall. 

As bad as all that was, though, Hurney's true disaster came through re-signing the talent at the core of that 2-14 team. That's part of the benefit of hiring a new general manager when you go 2-14; you get a fresh set of eyes that isn't emotionally committed to the talent currently on the roster in the same way that a GM who scouted and drafted that talent is.

Just as a note, Charles Johnson was considered the best pass rusher on the open market and DeAngelo Williams was considered one of the best running backs on the open market. They were free agents and I don't know if they would have gotten the money they got in Carolina anywhere else, but the Panthers were dedicated to re-signing their own players and showing their fans they want to win after the 2010 season.

Over several weeks last summer, Hurney handed out eight contract extensions to starters on that 2-14 Panthers team, including two that set records for players at their particular positions.

It's not a contract extension if a player is a free agent, as Thomas Davis (I believe he was a restricted free agent), Charles Johnson and DeAngelo Williams were.

The other five were, to borrow a term from Jonah Keri, crizazzlebeans. They seemed ill-advised at the time and, in most cases, look dramatically worse a year later.

What Bill Barnwell fails to mention is every player the Panthers re-signed were players that Marty Hurney had drafted. I can see from Barnwell's point of view how he doesn't like these contracts, but he fails to mention these are players that Hurney drafted. He gets the blame for the contracts, which I can see as fair, but the fact Hurney has drafted pretty well gets glossed over. Barnwell has the balls to call Hurney an "incompetent GM" in an effort to pile on, but he intentionally neglects evidence to the contrary.

Please remember the Panthers had used all of the 2010 season clearing cap room and Hurney had to re-sign these players in order to keep the faith of the fan base. He wasn't backed into a corner, but once he was ordered to clear cap space in 2010, he couldn't let some of the team's best players hit free agency after the lockout ended. I'm not excusing Hurney's averageness, just pointing out the situation at the time. The Panthers had to re-sign these players after taking a huge crap on their fans for an entire season.

A five-year, $50 million deal for Jon Beason that guaranteed the former "Seventh Floor Crew" member $25 million and made him the highest-paid inside linebacker in league history. The deal, signed in July 2011, came amid reports that Beason had been struggling with an Achilles injury for several months. Beason went on to tear his Achilles tendon during the opening week of the season, an injury that cost him the remainder of that campaign and will have deleterious long-term effects on his career.

I'm not sure where these reports came from or if there were NFL guys "in the know" about this, but there isn't a way the Panthers could have known Beason would tear his Achilles in the first game of the season. Plenty of GM's have re-signed players, only to have that player get hurt. It doesn't mean the GM doesn't know what he is doing. What was the alternative in this situation? Allow Beason to play the entire season without a contract? Sure, knowing what we know now Hurney should have let Beason play his contract out. They could have saved some money on re-signing Beason. What Barnwell doesn't acknowledge is that Beason is the leader of the defense. You don't let the leader of your defense, who is playing in the prime of his career, go without a contract extension and head towards free agency. It sends a bad message. You take care of your best players. Yeah, if Hurney had hindsight he would probably have done things differently. I think it is more than unfair to use hindsight as proof why Beason should not have been re-signed. There are a lot of reports about players having injuries which don't affect their career, so it isn't like these reports will obviously lead to a career-threatening injury.

 A five-year, $36.5 million deal for Thomas Davis, a talented linebacker coming off of ACL tears in consecutive seasons.

Davis got screwed by free agency getting changed around when the lockout occurred. He could have been a free agent, but players with five years of experience didn't reach free agency until their sixth year. It was a large deal that Davis would have lived up to if he had stayed healthy. The deal is essentially now a pay-for-play deal after it has been restructured a few times. Davis is now a pass-rushing specialist and third down linebacker making $2.1 million this year. That doesn't seem exorbitant to me. He's fairly affordable until 2015.

Davis played in the first two games of the 2012 season, but was inactive against the Giants on Thursday night.

Because it was a short week and he tweaked his hamstring. Davis is still a very important part of the Panthers defense.

A four-year, $12 million deal for Olindo Mare, yet another example of a team being fooled by a kicker...Mare is currently a free agent and probably, because of his leg on kickoffs, better than half the kickers who signed franchise deals this offseason.

This is the only signing by Hurney that didn't involve a player the Panthers drafted. Mare was a disaster, but how can Barnwell pick on this signing if he says Mare is better than half the kickers who signed franchise deals this offseason? The franchise tag for kickers was $2.814 million. Mare was given $3 million per year. The deal didn't work out, but if Mare is better than half the kickers who are being paid $2.814 under the franchise tag, was it really that bad of a deal, other than it ended up not working out?

That was the biggest difference between the Panthers and Giants last night. Giants general manager Jerry Reese is one of the best-drafting general managers in all of football, and you saw that in the players who were making plays.

The fact Hurney hasn't drafted as well lately as one of the best GM's in the NFL doesn't make him incompetent. The Giants clearly have a better team and better depth than the Panthers did. Yes, this is partly Marty Hurney's fault. The fact Hurney isn't Jerry Reese doesn't show Hurney's failings, but shows how good Reese has been.

Brown had been cut and bounced around the league after his Achilles injury, but the Giants originally drafted him in the fourth round of the 2009 draft. Ramses Barden hadn't made an impact before Thursday, but he was a third-round pick that same year. Victor Cruz was an undrafted free agent nabbed by the team for the minimum. That's depth the Panthers can only dream of.

So you mean a team that went 2-14 two years ago doesn't have as good of depth on the roster as a team that won the Super Bowl last year? This is revolutionary! What a wonderful and in-depth piece of analysis! You wouldn't think the defending Super Bowl champs would have better talent up-and-down the roster than a team that went 6-10 last year, would you?

The average two-win NFL team wins an average of 3.1 games the following year, meaning that the Panthers only outperformed that expectation by 0.9 wins.

But they did outperform expectations, right? So why doesn't this count? The Panthers are rebuilding. The Panthers "only" outperformed expectations by that amount. I thought exceeding expectations was a good thing. Carolina wanted to keep all of the quality players that Hurney had drafted from 2004-2008 because they had cut costs the previous year. Basically, they rebuilt backwards. They cut costs and then re-signed their own players to deals, as opposed to cutting costs because they had signed underperforming players to large deals.

And the average 2-14 team doesn't spend themselves into a stupor to get out of the gutter.

While that's true, the Panthers didn't do short term spending on older players to get out of the gutter either. They paid under-30 players who were already on the team. So they did spend a lot of money to get out of the gutter, but the money wasn't spent on short-term solutions, but was spent on young, (hopefully) long-term solutions. Clearly, Thursday night made it look like the plan wasn't working and I'm not going to argue it is working at this point. His 2009-2011 drafts have killed the depth of the team in a time when depth was badly needed because of the cost-cutting during the 2010 season. It's way too early to tell about the 2012 draft. Right now, for better or worse three players are starting and Frank Alexander is the third defensive end, while the punter that was drafted (Brad Nortman) won the punting job in Training Camp. I think (and I will include myself in this) many people unfairly expected more from this flawed team.

Richardson is a former player held in high regard among his fellow owners around the league, but remember that he's the same guy who reportedly dismissed the likes of Drew Brees and Peyton Manning during the lockout negotiations by insulting their intelligence and asking them if they knew how to read the revenue chart.

Do they know how to read a revenue chart? I'm not sure these two players do know how or should know how to read one. So it may have been a jerk move, but he could have been correct also.

It seems ironic that an owner who doesn't trust the players to understand basic economics has entrusted his team to a general manager who doesn't seem to have a strong grasp on it, either.

This is a very convenient article to be posted after the Panthers got blasted on national television. Where was this article in the offseason or last week after the Panthers defeated the Saints? This strikes me as a very opportunistic and slightly unfair scathing review of Hurney. He isn't Jerry Reese. It's an unfair comparison to use in order to show Hurney's incompetence. Nobody needs Bill Barnwell to write a column explaining the difference in these two GMs. Marty Hurney is a GM who is occasionally very good and occasionally very bad. The Panthers need him to be very good over the next few years. He picked a very bad time to be bad at drafting (around the 2010 season) and the criticism of the contracts he gave out after the 2010 season conveniently leaves out that Hurney has a history of drafting well prior to the 2009 season.

Bill Barnwell doesn't have an agenda, but his criticism of Hurney leaves out some portions of the relevant storyline to fit his own narrative, as well as leaves out Hurney's previous history of drafting. Compared to Jerry Reese there are a lot of GM's that are incompetent. It's interesting to read this scathing article after a public loss on national television and not on a Wednesday in August when the facts don't seem to perfectly fit the narrative Barnwell is furthering.