Greg Olsen wears a white custom New Era hat with a gold ‘K’ on the front to signify the thousand yards he’s racked up in each of his previous three seasons; each of the years since 2014 is signified by a claw mark, presumably designed to look as if they were made by a panther, near his right temple. While Olsen is the first tight end in NFL history to achieve that particular statistic, the 32-year-old plans to make that hat inaccurate by the end of this season by reeling in a fourth consecutive thousand-yard season and adding a fourth slash to his temple. But then he’ll have a problem; he’ll need a new hat.
That’d be a good problem to have.
The thousand yard mark is Olsen’s goal every season, he believes it’s the statistic that sums up his game. “Be productive, but be productive consistently. Be durable. Play every game, there’s a lot that goes into it, there’s a lot of guys who are productive for a four or five game stretch and they have to sit a few out and come back,” Olsen said, “Or a guy has a great one year, fall off, and can he have a bounce back? I don’t ever want that to be me.”
With the Carolina Panthers adding new weapons this year, Olsen should have an easier time stretching the defense, as he was double and even triple teamed during stretches of last season, especially near the red zone. The new additions will help to open up new areas on the field, from the shifty rookie running back from Stanford who creates more space for deeper seam routes to the speedy wide receivers like Damiere Byrd or Curtis Samuel who open up the areas underneath. In Olsen’s words, when it comes to offense, “the more good guys out there running around, the better it is for everybody.”
While the offense has changed, rumors of the huge offensive overhaul coming for 2017 may have been grossly exaggerated. Olsen says that when a team has the continuity in coaches and quarterback that the Panthers have had for the past half decade, the team doesn’t need to reinvent itself every year; the offense, formation, and terminology stays the same, aside from some tweaks and wrinkles. The word “evolution” indicates a refusal to allow the team to make the mistake of standing still, of not moving forward, of not trying to become a better version of themselves.
Leaning on the successes of the past will only lead to failures in the future.
“If you’re not constantly challenging yourself to get better, and constantly challenging yourself as an individual, as an offense, to progress and do things differently and keep defenses off balance; the defenses in this league are too good, they’ll tee of on you pretty fast.” Olsen said today when speaking to the media. “You have to keep those guys on their heels, and I think that’s just the natural evolution of offense in this league.”
With his offseason marred by contract demands and rumors that Olsen might hold out from training camp, the ten-year-vet is ready for football to start. As the team slowly installs more and more of their offense, the team gets closer and closer to meaningful games and farther from the messy firing of general manager Dave Gettleman and the thought that he and linebacker Thomas Davis’ request for new contracts had anything to do with it. “I think for people to think that players have that much control over an organization is a bit silly. There’s one guy that runs the organization, and that’s Mr. Richardson,” Olsen said last month. “To suggest that Thomas and I had anything really to do with it wasn’t even really something that I thought I needed to address.”
While quarterback Cam Newton did not throw today to rest his sore shoulder, Olsen is not worried. The tight end thinks that Newton has looked like the quarterback he has always been at every turn, from the annual offseason trip to Baltimore the quarterback takes with his pass catchers to the practices they had last week. Olsen doesn’t find Newton’s absence on the field today alarming by any means. He know there’s a plan for his quarterback, and the plan, like with the rest of the team, is all hurtling towards the game against San Francisco on September 10th.
“When it’s time for him to throw, he’ll throw.”
