Cat Scratch Reader
Can the safety room that was purposefully built to stop the run handle all other aspects of the position?
While the praise for the Carolina Panthers offseason has been plentiful, there’s one aspect of the team’s roster decisions that continues to confound fans and media alike: what are the Panthers planning to do at the safety position?
Even as the NFL continues its shift towards position-less football, it’s still common for the roster builders across the league to keep to the traditional strong and free safety positions. One player taking the hard-nosed, close to the line of scrimmage enforcer role while the free safety is the playmaking ball hawk who acts as the last line of defense to prevent anyone on the offense from getting on top of the defense.
No team exemplified this dynamic more than the Seattle Seahawks of the early 2010s, who had Earl Thomas and Kam Chancellor, both arguably the best free and strong safety in the NFL. Panthers Head Coach Dave Canales even had a front row seat to witness their glory as he had to go against it every day at practice as an offensive position coach with the Seahawks.
Despite Canales’ formative years in the NFL being exposed to the Seattle Cover 3 system and the epitome of traditional safety play, he and the rest of the brain trust with the Panthers have seemed to eschew that line of thinking in favor of a more versatile philosophy when it comes to safeties.
By versatile, I mean practically identical skill sets where each player is virtually interchangeable with the others. With multiple offseasons’ worth of opportunities for the Panthers to try and find a traditional free safety, they’ve gone the exact opposite direction. With each version of the roster they continue to forgo diversity and opt towards safeties with increasingly similar skill sets, strengths and weaknesses.
The Panthers entered the offseason with Demani Richardson as the only safety on the roster. A second year player who started out as a UDFA, Richardson was easily the Panthers most reliable tackler during the back half of the season, posting the team’s highest PFF tackling grade for the season among players with over 50 snaps on defense. When asked to cover, Richardson did seem to struggle much more compared to when he’s given the opportunity to play downhill. This was no more evident than in the 2025 season finale, where Richardson was asked to take on his heaviest coverage assignment of the season. Versus the Atlanta Falcons in the season finale, Richardson played much of the game as the primary nickelback and in 39 snaps in coverage scored a 31.9 coverage grade.
Entering free agency, it was a surprise to no one paying attention that the Panthers had signed a safety for a big money (relative to the rest of the safety market) in Tre’Von Moehrig. Moehrig had a career year in 2024, in no large part to how...
