Tre Boston: "Right Now, We're Slept On and We Respect It"
Tre Boston spoke to the media on Monday and had a lot to say about what to expect from the Panthers defense this season. Boston recently inked a three-year, $18 million deal with the team and will be looking to lead the secondary in 2020. The Panthers are projected to have a losing season by many critics, but Boston, like many other members of this organization, is highly aware of that. He said the following about the low expectations placed on Carolina this year:
“Right now, we’re slept on and we respect it. We respect everybody’s opinions. Right now, we’re just going out there every day to get one percent better. Every day working on something, working on the details. It’s about the little things right now with a young team. The quicker we can get ourselves focused on the details and learning what we should do every play, the quicker we won’t allow ourselves to beat each other. When you’re playing the game of football, there’s a lot of beating yourself and right now we’re learning just to continue doing our job.”
The team's youth came along with the rebuild that took place after Carolina hired Matt Rhule to replace Ron Rivera as head coach. Tre Boston was drafted by the Panthers in 2014 and played in Carolina for three years before his brief stints with the Chargers and Cardinals in 2017 and 2018 respectively. He has experienced the Rivera Era Panthers and is now entering the Rhule Era. Here's what Boston had to say about the revamped secondary:
“We’re a fast unit. We’re young and I think that has an advantage to it. We have a coach (secondary coach Jason Simmons) that’s played in the league and he’s done a great job of coaching us up and getting these young guys ready. We have a culture here that is an identity that we’ve had before, it’s just reshaping it and getting guys up to par with how we want to do things.”
He also reinforced the idea of the "positionless defense" that has been entertained by the coaching staff:
"We can move guys all the way around. We’re never in 'matchup threats' in our defense. We believe in our defense and we’re fast, whether that’s the linebacker position, corner position, safety position. Them being able to move around and guard anybody interchangeably, there’s never a down where we feel uncomfortable because we have these weapons and we’re so versatile to do different things with them and we plan on using that to our advantage.”
Speaking of "positionless" defenders, Boston had some praise for rookie safety Jeremy Chinn. He compared him to Shaq Thompson, who is turning into another leader on this defense. Here were Boston's thoughts on the dynamic rookie:
“He’s athletic, the sky's the limit. He has the possibility to be the real deal, He reminds me a little bit of Shaq when Shaq first came in here. Shaq was the first rookie that I had seen that I was like ‘ooh, yeah, that guy’s a pro, that kid’s going to be special’. Chinn gives you that feel of being that way. He’s done a good job of learning, he’s got a lot of stuff on his plate, but as long as he takes it one day at a time and understands that he doesn’t have to do anything but his job, we plan on making it easy for him and let him fly around.”
As training camp continues, it will be interesting to see how Boston and the rest of this young defense develops. If they match up with teams as well as Boston says they will, then the Panthers could win a lot more games than expected.
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