CHARLOTTE It was precisely 2:39 p.m. when Dan Morgan walked into Bank of America Stadium before the first round of the 2026 NFL Draft, a little over five hours before it started, and seven hours before he'd pick.

He was looking slightly tanned, more or less relaxed, and carrying the jacket he'd change into later after his traditional half-round of golf the morning of the event.

"How'd you hit 'em?"

"Only played one good hole all day, and it was the last one," Morgan laughed. "That's usually how it goes."

As long as that one works out, that's usually enough to keep you coming back. And that's a story about the Panthers general manager's golf game as well as this year's draft class.

As much time as they spent preparing, and as many times as they worked through the hundreds of possibilities of what might happen in front of them, it rarely worked out as well as it did with their first two picks which they used on offensive tackleMonroe Freelingand defensive tackleLee Hunter.

To get those two guys, that was a scenario almost too good to be true, and one they weren't counting on.

But that one time when it worked out was all that mattered.

Cassie Baker/Carolina Panthers

To understand how the Panthers got out of their first two picks with two needed big men requires understanding how they prepped for the process.

And that requires understanding a little about the proprietary draft simulation program they've used every day since it was ready to go in mid-January. You can't understand it fully unless you're the kind of person who speaks in numbers at a doctoral level. And you can only understand as much as Morgan and executive vice president of football operations Brandt Tilis are willing to reveal about what they call vice president of analytics Eric Eager's "secret sauce."

"The app," as Morgan casually refers to their draft simulator, does a lot of heavy lifting in the winter and spring. It works in conjunction with old school scouting and grinding through film, preparing them for and informing their selections throughout the weekend, down to the percentage chances of two particular players being available at any particular spot, in case they traded from this spot to that one which is a whole other set of calculations.

There are a lot of numbers flying around.

But the number of times they left their simulated drafts with the two guys they picked 19th and 49th overall is a lot smaller.

"We go through a million mock drafts before the actual draft," Tilis said. "And the drafts where we get Monroe and Lee looked pretty freaking good."

"A non-zero number," Eager replied, as narratively as a born quantifier can. "But almost always when it happened, we said, 'God, this would be nice.'

"Any one string of outcomes is pretty rare, but yeah, to get two players we had rated so highly, where we got them, we consider ourselves fortunate."

Morgan's a former linebacker who saw things before they happened on the field because of his preparation and instincts, but he's not a mathematician. That's not the same as not being analytical, because he has put enough time into his board; he has a feel for it. And he also knew from all the work they did on the front end that this outcome wasn't particularly likely, but it was one they hoped for.

"No, it wasn't common," the GM said. "I've maybe gotten that outcome once or twice. Maybe.

"But in my mind, there's no way that's going to happen."

Part of the reason Morgan wasn't optimistic, and viewed any premonition of it happening with skepticism, was based on how much he liked the players the old-fashioned way by watching them on film, by talking to them, talking to their people, relying on months of scouting, getting a full view of the player.

And also because he can count.

This year's draft was top-heavy with offensive tackles, but also in teams that needed one between the Panthers and the top. So when the draft kicked off at 8 p.m. with the Raiders on the clock and about to do the expected and take quarterback Fernando Mendoza, there wasn't a lot of suspense about the immediate.

"You think I should call Klint Kubiak right now?" Panthers head coach Dave Canales joked about the Raiders head coach as the clock ticked away the unnecessary seconds before the first pick became official.

Andrew Stein/Carolina Panthers

When you go into a draft picking 19th, you know what happens that first hour or so doesn't really pertain to you. As much as you might like David Bailey or Sonny Styles (and everyone did), they're basically priced out of your budget range. So when the Browns went on the clock with the sixth pick, that's when Tilis said: "Now the draft begins."

The Browns were one of those teams that reasonably figured to be interested in offensive linemen. But they were also listening to offers and eventually traded that sixth pick to the Chiefs, delaying the start of the run on blockers.

As the round progressed through the early teens, the Panthers watched with interest as things developed on multiple fronts. The tackles started going at No. 9, with the Browns starting the movement three spots later than originally scheduled with Utah's Spencer Fano after trading with the Chiefs.

The Giants then took Miami's Francis Mauigoa 10th, the Dolphins took Alabama's Kadyn Proctor 12th, and things started tightening up a bit, as the number of top tackles began to shrink. But after the Rams took a quarterback and the Ravens took a guard with the next two picks, there was a glimmer of hope.

Mostly, the concern was what Detroit was going to do at 17 and whether the Vikings might trade back from 18, because all the Panthers could really do was wait and accept phone calls from people wondering whether they'd be willing to trade back as well.

Morgan's standard answer was "depends on who's there," but he didn't say no because you always want options.

Before the Lions picked, Tilis called Mike Disner, Detroit's chief operating officer, just to check.

"Usually, teams are shopping for deals, and Mike knew that; Mike didn't even engage with me," Tilis said. "I was, 'Are you picking here?' And he kind of laughed. He was, yeah. He knew what I was doing."

And what everyone assumed they were doing was taking a tackle, after the release of left tackle Taylor Decker back in March. The Lions still had a great right tackle in Penei Sewell, who they could flip to the left, but at that point, there were a number of options on the board, including Clemson's Blake Miller, Freeling, Arizona State's Max Iheanachor, Utah's Caleb Lomu, and others.

Morgan was convinced that it was going to be Freeling, for the same reason he liked him because big, young, athletic left tackle prospects like this are rare this time of year. But Detroit's plan was to move Sewell to left, making Miller and his 54 career starts at right tackle a natural fit for them.

"I thought they were going to take him (Freeling), but I also understand why they took the guy they took too (Miller)," Morgan said of the Lions. "Because he's a true right tackle and started a ton of games at right tackle, and they're moving their guy to left tackle.

"So when they picked Miller, I wasn't surprised. But yeah, I was glad they did it."

Andrew Stein/Carolina Panthers

After the Clemson tackle was off the board, there was only one spot between the Panthers and their choice, so they went through their last-minute planning. They had choices at 19, plural, so they knew they could take someone they liked. But they also had options to move back, as they had two solid possibilities to move into the 20s if they wanted.

But the guy they wanted most was there. So after the Vikings picked Florida defensive tackle Caleb Banks, the next words were easy.

"Call him," Morgan said.

Moments later, an overcome-with-joy Freeling blurted out "Love you," on his way off the call, before owner David Tepper added a quick "Love you too," to cap off the night.

Without that moment of levity, it was almost easy to miss the fact that the Panthers had done the thing, because the room was so steady in the moments leading up to that spot.

"I felt calm about it because there were other guys that if he did get taken, I knew that we could turn the card in and feel really good about," Morgan said. "There was always a backup plan if that scenario happened, so from my seat, I was pretty calm about it."

It wasn't the kind of fireworks the Panthers have seen in the first round in the past they didn't even trade, or seriously consider any big offers, as they did last year when multiple teams wanted to move into the top 10 to take Tetairoa McMillan.

"Not a lot of drama," Tilis said with a shrug at the end of the night, almost apologizing for the lack of action.

But what the Panthers got was the guy they wanted, at a spot they never imagined getting him.

As to how they came to that realization, that's where Eager comes back in.

Throughout the year, he's building the model so Morgan, Tilis, and Canales have all the information they need to make quick decisions and the easy ones if they're fortunate.

To make a really complicated thing too simple, Eager takes all of the data on every prospect and puts it into the model. Stats, testing times, physical profile, all the stuff scouts are collecting throughout the year. He's then pairing it with their evaluations and external factors as deemed appropriate. Stuff like certain media mock drafts, prospect rankings, and such all go in the pot.

"It's all of the above," Eager said. "Everything goes into the stew, and I think a lot of the secret sauce is how much they get weighted. But, basically anything you can think of is going in there because at the end of the day, it's more information, as long as it's from independent sources, that's valuable, right?"

Indeed.

Eager pointed to an example from a decade ago that illustrated some of the fine points the mathematical models picked up. When Kansas State wide receiver Tyler Lockett was coming out in the 2015 draft, he was an undersized returner who had two seasons of big production in the Big 12, going for 1,262 receiving yards as a junior and 1,515 as a senior.

Eager recalled noticing him as a potential player that could create value relative to his draft status (third round, 69th overall, by the Seahawks, where he worked with Dave Canales). Lockett began his NFL career as an All-Pro returner in 2015 and became a big-time target, with four straight 1,000-yard seasons.

"That was the first year that we had some of these advanced statistics for a player," Eager noted. "And Lockett obviously had the speed that you need to stretch a defense, and he was efficient every time he had the ball. He also had the yards after the catch ability that you inferred from his returns at Kansas State, and he was an All-Pro returner as a rookie, and then became a really good receiver with Dave in Seattle.

"That was an example of a guy who ended up being better than where he was selected. And I think that the statistics at the time, which were relatively new, showed that and good on Seattle for taking him."

Andrew Stein/Carolina Panthers

The process has obviously been refined over the last decade and has become more polished. Morgan's impressed by the level of detail, showing a chart with dozens of bars comparing raw numbers on each player, indexed against the field, showing how players compare at their position or among particular groups.

From all that stuff, Eager builds out a system that allows the front office to participate in mock drafts at any time. Similar in theme to the consumer models popular with fans in the slow months of the offseason, but with the professional-level detail. (Asked about those online tools, Morgan said he tried one once, and when he realized some of the evaluations were off significantly [as in first-round picks being available in the third], he never went back.)

"They're able to take all of the data that we collect," Tilis said. "And they're able to show us one, what true value looks like based on everything that we have and everything that we believe in. And they're also able to give us an idea of what the rest of the world thinks.

"So then it's up to us to marry those two things."

By mid-January, Eager delivered the model for use, and they went to work on it, in and out of the office.

Morgan did a few drafts in his kitchen with his teenage son, Brady, a linebacker at Marvin Ridge High, after school and work.

"I'll do mock drafts with my son and then my son will do mock drafts, and he'll tell me that he could be a better GM than me," Morgan joked. "He's like, 'Let me cook.'"

But when the actual GM was back in the office, surrounded by college scouting director Jared Kirksey and his staff, and coaches throughout the spring, the heat went up.

Andrew Stein/Carolina Panthers

As a staff, they went through many hundreds of these exercises involving human beings, and Eager and his staff (which includes director of data science Ben Brown and football analytics manager Benjamin Contrino) are inputting those results back in to shape future models.

"Basically continuously," Eager said of their frequency. "We're just simulating thousands and thousands of those, basically doing synthetic runs of what Dan's doing. And then we draw from those and try to understand how likely things are going to happen based upon these synthetic environments."

But the humans in the room have their own wrinkles to add, which helps to polish the models.

"The closer we get to the draft," Morgan said, "the more accurate they become."

Tilis said one of his challenges is to make sure they're thinking of everything as they go through the mocks.

If you're going to use a tool at every step of the process, as a chef does with their best knives, it helps if they're sharpened to a keen edge.

"I give Eric a hard time," Tilis said. "I'm always trying to push back on what the models are saying and making sure that we're thinking of certain things and that we're building in certain assumptions or not building in certain assumptions. I feel bad for him cause he's got to put up with me, and I'm endless with it.

"But that's also because it's something that we use. I would say we have fully integrated analytics into our processes, and they have to be right. So thankfully, Eric can handle all of me getting after him. But at the same time, it's really not that much different than the roster, right? Dave talks about bringing in competition. The competition for the model is me asking him, are you sure this is right?"

Andrew Stein/Carolina Panthers

While Tilis describes himself as a tough taskmaster, it's with a clear goal in mind. And the way Eager has responded has been to refine his process by making sure the coaches and the numbers can talk to each other.

"Eric is incredibly valuable to everything that we do, and a lot of that just has to do with who he is as a person," Tilis said. "He's a connector in our building; he's able to talk to a lot of different people. He's able to spend time with our coaching staff, with our scouting staff, with his staff. He's able to go over and deal with IT. He can do a lot of different things.

"His main thing is analytics, and he's great at that too. That's his bread and butter, and he's able to tie all that together."

Getting everyone speaking the same language is the key, because the goal is common. The main thing for all of them is to win, and every time someone in the room pushes back on the numbers, it gives the numbers a better chance to be right.

Cassie Baker/Carolina Panthers

"Better questions make better models," Eager said, generalizing a very specific process.

"Brandt does a really good job of giving little scenarios that cause pressure with our board," Eager continued. "And I think one of the reasons Dan is able to command the board so well on draft night is because Brandt uses the simulation in some ways to challenge the corners of the outcomes that we may not view as advantageous, but those have a high probability of happening, and so we went through those scenarios with a fine-toothed comb. And I feel like our leadership did a really good job of teasing out from the group what we could and should do in those situations, and it was cool."

Asked for an example of a Tilis curveball, Eager paused.

"I actually don't want to give it away," Eager said. "Because he has such a unique way of thinking.

"Only being able to simulate the easy stuff is not going to be helpful. You always want to create a situation where the game, so to speak, is easier than the practice. And I think that we've created that here."

That kind of practice showed up on several occasions the rest of the draft, and the Panthers were grateful for it.

After all the hubbub that comes with a first-round pick's arrival, shifting gears back into draft mode Friday night for the second and third rounds takes a moment to reconnect, a deep breath before it begins again.

By 5:30 p.m. on Friday, Tilis was sitting alone in the draft room, making calls. A little later, Morgan came in, well before the 33rd choice was on the clock. And with a lot of time, there were a lot of players they had rated in their top 50 who kept coming off the board.

By 7:38 p.m., they started asking Eager about the potential of particular players as a group being there when they picked at 51, and Eager would reply in percentages. And the one name that was part of that group included a big defensive tackle named Lee Hunter. But as other players in the group came off the board, they made a few calls to make sure they didn't miss one of their preferred ones.

The trouble with making trades is that the other team gets a choice in the matter, too, and not everyone wants to give up a pick. After a few calls, they got the Vikings at 49 to bite, flipping a fifth for a sixth to move up two spots to land Hunter (the 51st and 159th picks for the 49th and 196th).

Charlie Riedel/Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

In football terms, Morgan was fine making the small move up because the defensive tackle class was top-heavy, and after Hunter, there was a drop to the next layer of players on the board at his position. But it also wasn't a large price to pay for someone you want.

"Having Eric and his group, the stuff that they do arms me at least with the confidence of whatever we're going to do trade-wise," Tilis said. "Take a guy like Lee Hunter. We're not going to try to get too caught up in, we've got to make sure our fifth-round pick is great. We're not going to lose sight of value.

"The stuff that we can control in the drafts is at the top. And then if guys pan out late, that's great. That happens. If we knew (last year's undrafted rookie kicker)Ryan Fitzgeraldwas going to be as good as he was, he would have been drafted, right? Let's just make sure that we have good value on whatever trades that we make, and we believe that the guys we draft early are going to be the ones that are most likely to contribute for us."

For the rest of Friday night, there were more calls than action. They explored moving up and back, but couldn't find the right fits. And even after taking wide receiverChris Brazzell II83rd overall, the calls didn't stop. They're always looking, but nothing is happening. And that can get frustrating when you've built a reputation for dealing (six trades in their first two drafts together).

"I love trading," Tilis admits, though a verb like admit makes it sound like he's doing something wrong, and it hasn't been proven as such.

"I love the trades. I would trade all the time if I could," he continued. "To me, that's always fun because it's such an imperfect system. We all have these point charts. We're all very confident in them. But at the same time, everybody also understands we have no idea what they mean. So, it's just kind of fun to figure it out with the other teams.

"But then, outside of trading, my favorite part is the pick right before we pick. Where you're just waiting, what are they going to do? Usually, we've got one guy, and then we have a backup, and what's going to happen? That tenseness, it's like third-and-5, what's going to happen here?"

With nothing so enticing that they had to move again on Friday, they got ready for a flurry on Saturday.

The Panthers entered the day with four additional picks, the 119th, 158th, 196th, and 200th. By the end of the day, they had none of those, but four additional ones in different spots, a little later on the front and back side, but closer together in the middle.

But before you get locked into numbers, Morgan is talking about names.

Even before they left Friday night, when they were talking about Day 3 targets, and you'd hear Penn State safetyZakee Wheatley's name for the first time, because strengthening the secondary is a thing they wanted to do. And before the draft even started on Saturday at noon, Morgan had specifically named the next three players they'd leave the day with (along with cornerbackWill Lee IIIand centerSam Hecht), and later mentioned seventh-round linebackerJackson Kuwatchmore than two hours before they were on the clock. Those weren't the only four names he said, but all those guys fit into the ranges where they thought they'd be picking.

On the third day, you tend to think of players in groups, as in, here are four defensive backs who could make our roster and challenge for positions, or here are a couple of offensive linemen who could help. So when a team called offering the chance to move up double-digit spots from 119, Morgan replied, "Only if three of our guys are gone."

Eager was asked, and replied that at the offered spot, there was a 99 percent chance one would be there. At 119, there was still an 87 percent chance.

So they waited.

And then Jacksonville called, wanting to move from 124 to 119.

Eric? "Eighty-five percent one of them, 50-50 that two would be there."

And then Chicago called to see if they could move to 124, and the chances were still good the Panthers would get one from the group. So they moved back again.

The net result was that their next two picks went from 119 and 158 to 129 and 144, compressing the range of picks and allowing them to zero in on some targets, namely a physical corner in Lee and a center in Hecht, who will add competition to the offensive line.

But the phone calls continued. Groups of hypothetical players are nice, but the Panthers wanted a safety to add to the mix, and Wheatley was still sitting there. They weren't able to move up as high as they tried to, but they also didn't need to. When they called Miami to see if they could squeeze up from 158 to 151, the Dolphins were in. That marked their third deal in a two-hour span that was often frenetic, because if they made three trades, they talked to at least twice as many teams they didn't deal with during that time.

It was a barrage of calls, and lists of which picks the Panthers actually held became obsolete in minutes.

And with those deals, the value of flipping a five for a six on Friday to get Hunter was recovered, and the Panthers were able to lock in three particular targets, while pushing their final pick deeper into the seventh round.

"I mean, it's fun," Morgan said of that sequence. "It's fun first and foremost, but I'm sitting there, and OK, there are five guys on the board at the time. So when we traded back twice, I was sitting there talking to Brandt, he says, 'Do you want to trade back again?' Yeah, let's trade back again if we can recoup some of the draft capital that we lost from going up for Lee, which we wound up doing at the end.

"It's part of the strategy that we already prepared for, because we already knew our board. We already knew that we were convicted on five guys that are on the board."

That's the important part; they got three of the guys on Saturday that they identified as players of interest earlier in the day. And then they could rest a bit while they waited for that long gap between 151 and 227, which was going to be at least two hours.

"When the player you want falls to you, that's the best," Eager said when asked about the series of trades. "And there's no better feeling than seeing the decision makers trust the tool and for it to come through.

"There's really no better feeling, I think, and by the time some of those picks happen, the relief is so palpable, right?"

By 3 p.m. on Saturday, they were left with one pick and plenty of time to kill, and Morgan said a list of three names he'd like to see at that last pick, all the way at 227. One of them was Kuwatch.

Not everyone handles free time well.

"I hate sitting," Morgan said. "I'm very antsy when it comes to not doing something."

Eager started working ahead, scoring the 2026 model in real time, aligning results to what they anticipated. But that's a lot of grinding, to be that diligent on what's already a long weekend.

"Yeah, that was a long time," Tilis said of that break between Wheatley and (eventually) Kuwatch. "What did I do? I went and ate twice, maybe. Just hang out, talk to the people. It's fun. We have a good room. We get to sit around with all my friends and talk about one of the biggest days of the year for our group, so yeah, time flies. It doesn't feel like it's endless."

While most of the talk in the room is football-centric, at one point, some of them will start talking admiringly about their daughters, and Tilis joked, "Boys are dumb. When I was that age, I was running head-first into whatever."

But they didn't get to this spot by being dumb.

They got here through an arduous process, honed over months and months.

And that's not all math.

"Everything changes and you constantly have to adapt," Eager said. "I think one part of big-A analytics that people misunderstand, like this whole thing doesn't get automated away. We very much have to monitor these, man and machine, or else we're going to miss something critical to the process, right?"

And for every computerized input, there are those human elements. Conversations with coaches by Zoom. Meals with college coaches to learn more about players. But always, for Morgan, it comes back to the film.

During the fall, before he walks out to a regular-season practice, he'll spend time at his desk rather than watching guys stretch. If you ever want to know where Dan Morgan is at any time of day, bet on "watching film," and your chances of being right are decent. That's how you know Jackson Kuwatch is putting up big numbers at Miami of Ohio, long before a Hula Bowl performance gets him invited to a more prestigious East-West Shrine Game and onto a lot more radars.

"I make sure I know everybody on our board," Morgan said when asked about a relative unknown like Kuwatch. "I can have the conviction when I put the work in. That's why I make sure that I sit in my office during the fall and I watch countless guys because I know that it's going to pay off at the end, where I know these guys and I can have conviction on who we pick."

That, and hundreds if not thousands of mock drafts from his gigantic monitor on his desk, to his iPad in his kitchen, while his son is trying to one-up his dad, the actual GM.

Bringing all that together is Morgan's responsibility, and it's a big job.

Andrew Stein/Carolina Panthers

"Dan's a really good leader," Eager said. "One of the traits of a great leader is that you're excellent at your own job, and I think every single scout in our building looks up to him as an evaluator. That's the number one thing, but he knows the right questions to ask of me because he is incredibly curious about not only football but the process of evaluating football players. And so he just asked really good questions.

"And then as an analyst, it's really fun, and frankly, easier to do your job when the stakeholders ask good questions. So he's an excellent evaluator, and everybody feeds off of that. And then he asks incredible questions, which then force me to create solutions, which create better questions, which create better solutions.

"I think that core curiosity that he has is the fuel for everything, right? Better subject matter experts always make for better collaboration, for sure."

But as much time as they spent on the model, the reality still turned out better than they could have hoped.

Adding Freeling and Hunter at the top happened "a non-zero number of times" in the exhaustive prep. But by realizing that on the front end, making a quick decision to give something up something you'd get back later materializes.

More work tends to increase one's chances of getting lucky.

And just like in golf, it only has to work out once to set the hook, and have you ready to do it all over again.

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