Panthers’ general manager Dave Gettleman and head coach Ron Rivera spoke to the media Thursday in the team’s pre-draft press conference.
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The Carolina Panthers placed the franchise tag on Josh Norman back in March. That $15M-per-year average makes Norman the highest-paid cornerback in football, with the terms of his landmark deal surpassing the league’s $14M-per-season trio of Darrelle Revis, Patrick Peterson and Richard Sherman.
According to ESPN’s Adam Schefter, the Washington Redskins have signed All-Pro cornerback Josh Norman to a five-year, $75 million deal. The Panthers elected to place the franchise tag on Norman, but the 28-year-old cornerback did not sign the tender and was expected to hold out from offseason workouts. The Panthers let him go because they were so far apart on money and weren’t willing to reach his asking price of around $15 million. “It really did”, Norman told “Redskins Nation” on Friday night. The two flamboyant stars got chippy with each other and eventually came to blows. With the realization that a deal was not going to get done, our internal conversations kept leading us to the fact that the one-year deal was becoming less and less attractive. That’s the ultimate goal.
The Redskins hosted Norman and his camp for a wooing session Friday after several players made recruiting pitches via Twitter. “Because I know I will one day and then make the wrong a right”. He named the 49ers, Dolphins, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Pittsburgh Steelers as some of the teams that are interested.
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In his first four seasons with the Panthers, Norman started 38 of 53 regular-season games and accumulated seven interceptions, 172 tackles, four forced fumbles, three fumble recoveries and 35 passes defensed. Dan Snyder and company clearly see something in Norman that the team that had Norman in the building and on the field for four seasons didn’t, and that attitude may have translated to significant 2016 draft-pick compensation for Carolina.
