Dan Morgan has been hired as Panthers GM. Should Tepper have hired an outsider instead?
Dan Morgan, the new guy in charge of the Carolina Panthers’ personnel, just performed his first near-miraculous maneuver.
He’s going to need to perform a second one to make this team good again.
Hiring Morgan really could work. He’s smart, he’s deeply invested, he knows the Panthers and the Charlotte market inside and out and he’s respected around the league after previous stints in Seattle and Buffalo.
But I didn’t think Panthers owner David Tepper would actually do this, because Morgan was so closely associated with previous general manager Scott Fitterer. He was Fitterer’s right hand man for the past three seasons, and in those three ugly seasons Carolina went 5-12, 7-10 and 2-15. It was that final year, when the Panthers posted an NFL-worst record, that did Fitterer in as GM.
Although Fitterer was the boss, Morgan was deeply involved in a number of questionable Panther personnel decisions: Trading Christian McCaffrey, picking Bryce Young over C.J. Stroud and declining the L.A. Rams’ offer of two first-round picks and a third-round pick for Brian Burns, to name just three.
Tepper could have picked from a number of other candidates who didn’t have the stain of those past three seasons, and he interviewed a bunch of them. And then he chose Morgan, whose official title will be President of Football Operations/General Manager. Somehow, Morgan convinced him this was the right path.
“Dan has a thorough knowledge of our football personnel and a clear vision to take us where we all want to go,” Tepper said in a statement released by the team Monday night. “We know he will attack this opportunity with the same intensity he did as a Panthers player.”
No doubt that’s true, but Morgan also is going to have to prove he’s different than Fitterer. In the next few months, he’s going to have to sign a far better free-agent class in 2024 than Carolina acquired in 2023, figure out what to do with edge rusher Burns’ contract and draft a stud with the No. 33 overall pick (the No. 1 pick, which would have been Carolina’s, got shipped to Chicago in the Fitterer regime).
If he fails, people will say, “Tepper should have known better. This was just more of the same.”
But Morgan somehow convinced Tepper that he can bring something different, something new to the Panthers.
It’s not the first time the organization has bet big on Morgan. With head coach George Seifert in charge, the Panthers drafted Morgan in the first round of the 2001 NFL draft (Steve Smith was the team’s third-round pick that same year). All Morgan cared about was football then. He was as single-minded as anyone who ever walked into the Panther locker room as a rookie, and I’ve seen every one of them.
“Football is me,” he said then.
When Morgan was healthy, he was Luke Kuechly before Luke Kuechly ever got to Charlotte. People forget that, but he was. Morgan made an unbelievable 25 tackles in the Super Bowl loss to New England.
Morgan also is one of the franchise’s last remaining direct connections to Sam Mills, the team’s first great inside linebacker and the Hall of Fame member who invented the “Keep Pounding” chant. Morgan played under Mills, who took the youngster under his wing and took him bowling as he got him used to what Charlotte was like.
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But Morgan had multiple concussions, and they drove him from the game early. He then began his career in the front office, starting as an intern in Seattle in 2010 and eventually becoming the Seahawks’ director of pro personnel. Then it was onto Buffalo and then back to Carolina in 2021.
Morgan, 45, knows what he’s getting into, having seen Tepper fire both head coaches Matt Rhule and Frank Reich in the middle of consecutive seasons over the past two years. He obviously wanted the job anyway.
He’s got a chance to do a great job, and that’s about all you can ask. But he’s going to have to be his own man, and show Panthers fans definitely this isn’t more of the same ol’, same ol’ thing.
This story was originally published January 22, 2024 at 7:02 PM.
