What should the Carolina Panthers do in this NFL Draft? My best answer is offensive

Every NFL Draft presents a platinum opportunity, even if your team doesn’t have a first-round pick.

Here’s an 11-person list of Carolina Panthers taken after the first round over the years: Steve Smith, Muhsin Muhammad, Ryan Kalil, Kris Jenkins, Josh Norman, Curtis Samuel, Kawann Short, Deshaun Foster, Mike Rucker, Mike Minter and James Bradberry.

The first two are already in the team’s Hall of Honor. The third will be, and there may be another one or two on that list who will make it eventually. The others all made untold millions in the NFL and at one point were starters — and often stars — for the Panthers.

So Panthers fans, don’t be discouraged as you watch the entirety of the first round of the NFL Draft on Thursday and see your team never get a turn (barring a trade up, which Carolina shouldn’t do). If the Panthers do it right, Friday and Saturday should bring in some riches for a team that went an NFL-worst 2-15 last season and remains in need of talent all over the field.

As of now, the Panthers hold both the 33rd and 39th picks in the NFL Draft. No. 33 is the very first pick in the second round — practically a first-rounder, really — and No. 39 is another early second-round pick courtesy of the controversial Brian Burns trade.

For the Panthers to succeed this week, I believe they need to make an early trade, then make an early pick and, most of all, fulfill a promise. Primarily they must be offensive — and I’m talking about picks, not the way they played last year.

Let’s start with the promise first, since much of the offseason hinges upon it. The Panthers have promised Bryce Young, through words and actions, that he’ll have more help this season to avoid the 2023 monstrosity. The idea is not to make Young do too much, because last season the Panthers’ offense was so poor it would often have gone three and out against air.

So to me, despite the need for edge rushers and cornerbacks and a center, the Panthers need to draft a wide receiver in the top 40 on Friday. I’m partial to South Carolina’s Xavier Legette, Florida State’s Keon Coleman and Texas’ Xavier Worthy. Wide receiver remains a position of extreme need for Carolina — a team that ended 2023, remember, by scoring exactly zero points in its final two games.

Do you know how hard that is to do in the NFL? To not even luck into a field goal for two straight Sundays?

Let’s review for a second. In those final two weeks last season, the Panthers finished the year with a 2-15 record, the worst mark in league history since the NFL went to a 17-game regular season in 2021.

And after not getting shut out for 21 straight years and 342 games in a row, they ended the season being blanked twice in eight days.

They got shut out 9-0 at home vs. Tampa Bay — getting booed frequently at Bank of America Stadium while doing so — and the week before got whipped 26-0 on the road in Jacksonville during a game in which team owner David Tepper threw a drink in the direction of Jaguars fans. That netted Tepper a $300,000 fine from the NFL. It was an egregious fortnight all around for the Panthers and their tortured poet fans.

Another inconvenient stat for the Panthers from the 2023 regular season: former Panther Christian McCaffrey scored 21 touchdowns by himself in San Francisco. Combine everyone on the Panthers’ offense and they scored 20.

So the promise of fixing the offense, which would in turn “fix” Young, must come first this weekend. And it’s not going to happen all at once, either, which is where the trade comes in.

Let’s assume here that the Panthers don’t trade into the first round — and they shouldn’t, because they need to gather assets right now as opposed to sending away more.

Pick No. 33 is actually more valuable than it sounds. The first round of the NFL Draft should end around midnight on Thursday. The second round doesn’t start until Friday night.

That means the Panthers have 20-plus hours to “sell” that pick, and that’s exactly what they should do. Some players with first-round grades inevitably fall out of the top 32, and then teams have 20 hours rather than 20 minutes to ponder what it all means.

So I’d trade that pick to get as many draft-pick assets as possible in either 2024 or 2025. In a trade-down scenario, coming up with an extra second-round pick would be ideal, but even another third-rounder would be OK. General managers and coaches are sometimes loath to trade down because they’re not sure they will see the benefit of those future picks — largely due to the fact they might be fired before the picks ever materialize into players.

But general manager Dan Morgan and coach Dave Canales are both brand new to their respective jobs and surely are going to get a couple of years out of them apiece, even given they work for one of the most mercurial owners in sports in David Tepper.

So, yeah, trade No. 33 for everything you can get. Then, with No. 39, go for a wide receiver.

Then, with the next two picks, take a swing at an edge rusher, a center or a cornerback, and fill the rest in from there.

That’s my best-case scenario for this weekend. Build the offense. Everything else has to be secondary.