Previewing the Divisional Round: Panther's 'Backers

Consistent with every athlete that has ever excelled on a professional team located in Charlotte, North Carolina, Jon Beason and the rest of the Panthers linebacking unit are pretty underrated. Perhaps Jon Beason has become more of a household name among more fairweather NFL fans, but he's still in the realm of a player you have no the hell idea about if you only watch ESPN and read ESPN.com. For me, he's the best mike linebacker in the NFC. He makes a ton of plays despite playing behind an absolutely mediocre to poor run-stuffing Defensive Tackle in Damione Lewis. You wanna know why the Panthers run defense looked so weak in the final weeks of the regular season, you should look right in Damione Lewis's direction. He fills holes unbelievably quick and is just a monster out there.
Thomas Davis is pretty impressive to watch as well. He really follows through in his hits, as he should. As most of you know, he was a Safety at Georgia and absolutely bulked up . He has a great motor especially for a position that demands a great motor, as will linebacker does. He's a former safety, so he's quick enough to cover a wide variety of skill positions, and is quite adept at covering running backs out of the backfield. 

Nail Diggs is easily the most overlooked of the three linebackers and is not nearly as flashy as Beason or Davis. Diggs is your prototypical sam linebacker in that he's tall and lanky(6'4, 237 lbs.), with long enough arms to jam Tight Ends at the line of scrimmage and overpower them.

The Panthers linebackers are a very good group that will need to really read the receiver splits of the Cardinals receivers well to make the proper depth of drops in coverage. All three are comfortable in space so I think they'll do just fine.