Panthers make changes to the front office

The Carolina Panthers let go of a couple people involved in the scouting and drafting of players.

According to Joe Person of The Athletic, the Carolina Panthers have let a couple of people go from positions in player personnel. Director of Player Personnel Cole Spencer and college scout Robert Haines are out.

Spencer joined the Panthers as the team’s Director of College Scouting in 2021 before getting promoted to his role as Director of Player Personnel in 2023. He was a scout at various levels in the Commanders organization for over 10 years prior to that. Robert Haines had been with the team for a very long time but I’m struggling to find specific details of his tenure.

Also, according to Person, the Panthers don’t intend to hire new people to fill the job titles but rather will absorb the job duties into other positions.

Person notes that the timing is a little strange with it being nearly a month since the draft, but I think that’s probably more a result of internal reviews of the organizational structure taking some time after the chaos of the draft to come to the conclusion that those two were no longer needed.

If I had to guess, I think the most likely reason for this is that the front office felt there was some redundancy in personnel roles and that they could get a more streamlined process with fewer people involved. With how much analytic information is being tracked at the college level and how many resources there are for prospect information on the world wide web, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a lot of teams to cut back the amount of resources they devote to boots on the ground scouting.

Maybe it’s something more salacious, but we’ll probably never know.