Panthers get much needed help going into the new season

Charlotte N.C- It was an unfortunate end to a roller coaster of a season, losing to the Philadelphia Eagles in the Wild Card round.

We got a chance to talk to Carolina Panthers’ head coach Mark Miller a couple days after the draft.

“It sucks losing, but I’m glad we were able to sneak into the playoffs considering how awful we played the last month of the season. I didn’t put a good enough game plan for the guys going into the game and our defense got shredded and our offense took a while to get going.”

How did you guys want to attack the off season to get ready for the upcoming season?
“Well we addressed the issues we had regarding pass defense, as much as it hurts it needed to be done, we traded Olsen away for a great FS in Randall. We also signed two outstanding corners with room to grow in our system, as well as drafting a corner in the 5th round. In the preseason I think we might experiment with running a 3-4 defense and see how that goes.”

Will you be addressing the current lack of healthy backs behind Christian McCaffery, a player who always seems to find himself injured for a couple weeks.
“Ya, we will definitely address that. We couldn’t land any free agents unfortunately, but we might be able to find a trade partner perhaps. Only time will tell, but we should be good with CMC back there. He has been putting in good work during this off season to get ready for a big work load. Just might have him rest a bit more during preseason.”

If the Panthers want to make it back to the playoffs they will need to improve their terrible pass defense which ranked 27th with 274 yards allowed per game and a whopping 5,704 total yards for the year which ranked 24th overall.

Their offense on the other hand was ranked 10th with 5,445 yards gained on the year, so clearly offense wasn’t holding them back.

They did spend a lot in the off season on secondary help and even traded Greg Olsen. Hopefully they can figure something out to fix the secondary, because if not they’re going to find it hard to get back to the post season, yet alone finish .500.

How will the offense respond with parting ways with one of Cam Newton’s favorite targets? Maybe if they can get a couple running backs they can afford to use McCaffery in the passing game more. Just like every year, Cam lead the team in rushing and they would love it if they can have an actual running back lead that category, especially with Cam suffering from fumbilitis.