The Carolina Panthers' offensive line is the most expensive in the NFL

They say that money can't buy you everything and in the case of the Carolina Panthers that is certainly the case with their absolutely horrible offensive line which was acquired over many years, was supposed to be the solution to Carolina's woes, and cost more than anyone has ever spent on an offensive line in the history of the NFL.

Ok, I made that last part up but it very well could be true. It definitely is true that they are the most expensive in the current league and it is also definitely true that they rank 26th out of 32 total teams in the NFL.

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If you don't know what an offensive line is let me give you a tl;dr: They are the gigantic people on the team that has the ball and it is their job to make holes for the guys with the ball to run through and more importantly, give the quarterback protection from the other line of gigantic people whose job it is to knock him to the ground and take the ball away.

When you spent $100 million on a group of people that most fans don't even know the name of nor truly understand their positions, that is a lot of money and in the case of Carolina it was meant to be an incredible strategy that few teams pursue and give them an advantage every time they have the ball.

Just like a lot of Carolina's whacked out plans though, this one has not come to fruition. Quite the opposite actually.

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Carolina has a tiny quarterback in Bryce Young. He also is not as fast on his feet as he would need to be and his size would suggest he would have. Therefore, these very expensive big men on the "front lines" have to give him time in order to get the plays going but this O-line, and especially in the past 2 games where Young was sacked 11 times, that expensive O-line has been doing an absolutely terrible job. He has been sacked 23 times in the last 8 games.

This would be a bit more forgivable if it wasn't for the fact that they were the highest paid in their positions in the world.

It's easy enough for me to sit on my sofa and point the finger. I did play American football but never in a linesman position. I was too small for that and instead was mostly a tight end, wide receiver, and tried my hands at QB from time to time.

I don't understand WHY they are so terrible, it just doesn't make sense to me that the best-paid people at this job aren't doing much better at it than they are.

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The promotional materials that went out about these "beast men" in the pre-season was pretty much everywhere if you are on the Panthers' radar, but it didn't take long for us to realize that we had been duped again by false or at the minimum lofty promises by the Carolina management.

For starters, these guys just can't stay healthy despite being younger and presumably less breakable than other players in the league.

Taylor Moton, Ikem Ekwonu, and Damien Lewis aren't even playing for the most part, because of nagging injuries. The combined salaries of just these 3 men is over $55 million. That's a lot of dough to put on a shirt and sit on the bench.

Every week that passes the offensive coordinator or the head coach will be asked about the underperformance of this expensive and heavy unit and they always make promises about line changes that are going to be game-changers but they never are. They mix of the numbers on the line a bit here and there but the same underlying problems of simply not being good enough and certainly not justifying their really high salary is evident normally after just a few snaps when they regularly leave holes in the line big enough to drive an ice-cream truck through.

I've gotten to the point where I can hardly watch it because it just makes me so mad. Maybe I am just one of those people that thinks, perhaps foolishly, that if you are spending the most money on the players in a sport that basically lets you spend as much money as you want to, shouldn't you end up with the best players? That's not the case at Carolina (I suppose we could pose Manchester United with the same issue). Carolina simply cannot make it work and this strategy of just "throwing more money at the problem" doesn't seem to be working either.

I'll say what I have said for many years now in regards to Carolina. What they really need to do is fire everyone, coaches, staff, managers, players, even kickers.... and start from scratch. I think you reach a point where a system is so incredibly broken that the best thing to do is just toss it out and start over.