The Panthers have remade their coaching staff since the end of the 2022 season and they’ve also made an addition to the executive ranks with a tie to new head coach Frank Reich from Indianapolis.
Brian Decker has been hired as the team’s vice president of development. Decker served in a similar role with the Colts over the last few years, but he came to the football world from a different path than most in the game.
Decker served 22 years in the military, including two combat tours in Iraq, and ran the selection and assessment program for Special Forces before switching gears to football. He worked for the Browns before joining the Colts and shared some of how his background prepared him for his current job.
“I was putting a lot of time on shoe, I mean, a lot of time,” Decker said, via the team’s website. “I was fascinated with human performance psychology and what makes people great. I wanted to read anything and everything that I could read on leadership, character, psychology, and everything about that. I had a theory going into it that if you take the sport-specific requirements away from it, and you look at people who go on to be great in any field become that top 1 percent; my theory is that they would be the same person. So if you’re going to be an elite golfer, an elite quarterback, or an elite baseball player, or an elite CEO, I bet they thought a lot alike, and that’s kind of what I found over time is that the demands placed upon greatness in any field are very similar from a makeup perspective.”
Part of Decker’s role will be looking for those traits as part of the draft evaluation process that’s going to be picking up steam in the near future and the Panthers are hoping that all of the recent changes set them on a better course than the one they’ve been on for the last few years.
