I would totally agree if he was healthy, but he wasn't and you have to take that into consideration when you are cutting bait with a size/speed freak you drafted in the second round.
Stephen Hill was having a dominant NFL debut in his first ever NFL Game, not just good, he looked terrific that home opener (verses the Raiders?), but late in the game he was seemingly going in for a TD when he got his legs taken out from under him inside the five yard line, close to the goal line, and it was a direct hit on his knee that came in from a side angle, the kind of hit that usually results in a torn ACL and that was my immediate fear when he came up limping.
It wasn't an ACL, but it was a sprained MCL and perhaps some torn cartilage that kept him out for the next six weeks or thereabouts, and the knee never completely healed, for the next two years that knee was an ongoing issue that sidelined him for weeks at a time and for most of the following years training camp when it flared up again and he had to have some fluid drained (twice). IOW's I don't know who was treating him, but he probably could have sued the SOB for malpractice!
Anyway, nobody ever talks about that history but its true, every word of it, and thats why I wouldn't have cut him last year.
It seems to me the Panthers did it the right way and gave him a full year to get healthy while they taught him their system.
We'll see how it goes, he very well could fail, but I would have held onto him for at least another year, especially with all of the crap we had at WR last year, there was at least one WR (Gates?) we could have cut to keep Stephen Hill.
