‘Slow torture’: Panthers finally trade Brian Burns, but they didn’t get nearly enough
The Carolina Panthers traded their best pass rusher away Monday, to the New York Giants, and what they got for Brian Burns in return wasn’t nearly enough.
Normally I’d try to explain why in a reasonable sort of way in the next sentence, but instead I’m going to let one of the Panthers’ best and most well-known fans do so first.
To quote country music prophet Luke Combs, whose North Carolina and Appalachian State roots run deep: “Panthers WHAT ARE WE DOING!?!?! No first round pick for McCaffrey a few years back and now none for Burns?!?! Are we just fire bombing the whole team here or what? I usually don’t comment on these kinds of things but it’s just becoming slow torture at this point.”
I couldn’t put it any better than that. The Panthers reportedly will get a second-round pick in 2024 and a fifth-round pick in 2025 for Burns, who plans to sign exactly the sort of contract with the New York Giants that Carolina wouldn’t give him (five years and $141 million, with about $76 million of it guaranteed, according to NFL Network).
So now the Panthers don’t have their pass rusher anymore, and yet they still don’t have a first-round pick, either. It just doesn’t make sense. Surely there was a better deal out there, somewhere, if the Panthers had played this all out better.
And it does feel a little like “slow torture,” as Combs said, for a team that went an NFL-worst 2-15 last season and then had its defense — the best part of a bad team — absolutely pillaged on Monday.
If it makes you feel any better, the Panthers still have a lot of money they can spend, and they have reportedly spent a lot of it already on two promising offensive guards Monday — Robert Hunt, formerly of Miami, and Damien Lewis, formerly of Seattle. So Bryce Young now has two more interior linemen to help keep the pass rush out of his face. That part’s good.
But Burns? Oh, man. Talk about a team selling at the wrong time.
In 2022, under the previous Carolina regime, then-Panthers general manager Scott Fitterer had a chance to trade Burns to the L.A. Rams, who were desperate to get him. The Rams were so desperate, in fact, that this is the offer they came up with, according to an NFL source: a third-round pick in 2023 and then first-round picks in both 2024 and 2025.
Two firsts and a third!
Instead, they’ve ended up with a second and a fifth.
Not only has Burns departed in the past couple of days, but so have free-agent linebacker Frankie Luvu (to Washington) and free agent pass rusher Yetur Gross-Matos (to San Francisco). Cornerback Donte Jackson and safety Vonn Bell are both apparently in the process of being released by the Panthers.
That’s five key defensive players gone from a defense that kept Carolina in one game after another last year, even though the putrid offense never led for a single play in the fourth quarter all season. All season! Carolina’s only two wins came on final-second field goals!
Other NFL teams are obviously smart, and they aren’t grabbing players off Carolina’s offense. They are going after that defense. At least defensive tackle Derrick Brown remains. I believe the Panthers, by trading Burns, are signaling that it’s Brown who they will ultimately give the $100-million plus contract to rather than Burns.
And Brown is a superb player when he wants to be, and in 2023, he really wanted to be. But he can’t do it by himself, and on Monday the Panthers filled a couple of holes on the offensive line but then saw numerous others spring up on the defense. It wasn’t the most auspicious debut for new general manager Dan Morgan.
With the Burns trade, the Panthers continue their tradition of developing their first-round picks into fine players for a few years, only to trade them away right around the time they are reaching their primes. Burns (2019), DJ Moore (2018) and Christian McCaffrey (2017) all will play for other teams in the NFC that Carolina is eventually trying to win — although even 3-14 would technically be an improvement for the Panthers in 2024.
Moore and McCaffrey had career years in 2023, in other area codes, while poor Bryce Young was trying to make do in the 704 with the worst set of receivers in the NFL.
Sports teams do this sort of thing to people. Even if you haven’t signed up for one of those ubiquitous and suddenly “legal in N.C.” betting sites on your phone, you know that.
Combs — whose tweet about the Panthers had around two million views as of Monday night — certainly does. As the North Carolina native belts out in one of his many hit songs:
Longneck, ice cold beer never broke my heart
Like diamond rings and football teams
Have torn this boy apart
These Panthers have torn many a boy and girl apart on Sunday afternoons for the past six years, when they have gone 31-68. They have missed the playoffs each of the past half-dozen teams.
It’s extremely early in free agency, and it’s true things could improve.
But Monday was, as Panthers linebacker Shaq Thompson tweeted without saying exactly what he was referring to, “a sad day.”
And unless the Panthers hit it big in the draft on their two second-round picks (Nos. 33 and 39) and on a lot more free agents in the next few weeks, there are going to be a lot more of those to come.
This story was originally published March 12, 2024 at 5:15 AM.
