“There’s no doubt there’s a jolt of energy,” Reich said of that moment. “Yeah, it was definitely a jolt of energy.
“I felt like coach’s excitement went up,” Coleman said. “Dave’s excitement went up even more. Dave was super excited.
“We were all looking around like, ‘This is going to happen.'”
But before they could flip the switch into celebration mode, there was an equal jolt of an opposite emotion.
“Dave was immediately worried about DJ,” Coleman said. “He and Nicole immediately were worried about DJ. And they said to Scott, you need to call DJ now because this is going to leak, and I want him to hear from us directly. So Scott immediately called DJ.”
Moore was surprised, but told Fitterer he understood the realities of the business. And as excited as the room was, there was the conflicting reality that a beloved Panthers player was part of the transaction.
“And Scott and everybody was kind of down for that moment because it was sad,” Coleman said.
After talking through things with Moore, they were wrapping up the final details. News broke around 5:00 p.m. By 5:30 p.m., the halls were dark on the football side of the team’s offices.
The party was now on the books and will happen tonight, with thousands of fans expected at Bank of America Stadium, excited to hear the name of the new quarterback, the one chosen after months of study, weeks of intense investigations, and about 60 minutes of even more intense back-and-forth to deliver him here.
In a little over an hour, the Panthers went from picking ninth to picking first overall. Their days in witness protection were over. Everyone would be watching them for the next seven weeks, and then they’d enter a new era.
As they left Fitterer’s office that afternoon, they exhaled, knowing the significance of what they had just accomplished.
“It was tense. Yeah, it was pretty tense,” Fitterer said. “You’re just thinking out loud, almost like, how do we do this? What’s right? You’re on the verge of trying to get the first pick in the draft. That’s a major thing to have. So just the gravity of it all. You could feel it; then you didn’t want to lose it.
“So that’s what we knew, but you’ve got to factor in what if you don’t get this guy? How are you going to get the quarterback in the future? OK, let’s go out, and we’re going to keep building our team. We’ll do well; now we’re going to be picking 12 or 15 or 16 in the years to come. That’s fine. That’s fine for football.
“But that’s not what we’re trying to be, right?”
That…
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