The Panthers have been making critical mistakes all season, but their intensity has ramped up for the past five weeks – mental mistakes, physical mistakes, emotional mistakes, coaching mistakes, playing mistakes – enough mistakes to make your head spin. Mistakes at the most critical times and mistakes at the most mundane times, missed kicks and penalties and poor tackling and dropped passes and blown blocking assignments and bad throws. Imagine something that could go wrong and it’s likely that the Panthers have done it and it’s cost them a win.
“I think you could look at each game that we’ve lost and say ‘there’s a play here’ in the previous three games, and it could be something different,” Rivera said, only slightly remixing the same schtick he’s given out for the past month. “Football – and you guys have heard it before – is about making four or five plays, or not making four or five plays, and that’s the truth of the matter. You can go back and look at it, and you can pick any four plays out that were instrumental in this game, and change one of them, and it’s a different outcome. But you can’t. What you can’t do is that when you have an opportunity to make plays, you have to make plays, or you can’t allow plays.”
“It’s not just about the mistakes you make, but about the plays that they make.”
Yes, the Browns made plays and sometimes – like when Baker Mayfield threads a dart 51 yards between Eric Reid and Donte Jackson into the waiting arms of Jarvis Landry who’s able to hang on even as Reid has his hand on the ball – you have to tip your cap. But the reason the Panthers lost on Sunday and the reason they’ve lost six of their seven games can be traced back to their own mistakes.
Here were some of the ways the Panthers let themselves down on Sunday as they dropped their fifth straight game to fall to 1-6 on the road – three of those five to teams with losing records.
Captain’s Hold
The Panthers have struggled to get pressure on opposing quarterbacks during their losing streak and the Browns had kept Mayfield relatively clean – he hadn’t been sacked in three weeks; while the Panthers weren’t able to generate pressure from their front four, at least not in the first half, they were able to move the #1 overall pick out of his comfort zone by sending blitzers, with their lone sack coming on a cornerback blitz.
But facing a third down – something the Panthers struggled at early in the game as the Browns started the game 3-for-3 on third down but finished by converting only one of their final six attempts – the Panthers had a chance to get off the field; in fact, they did get off the field as Thomas Davis blitzed and got to Mayfield for a would-be sack. Until the flag came out as the officials flagged Captain Munnerlyn for defensive holding over the middle against wide receiver Rashard Higgins.
Both Munnerlyn – and Rivera – were unhappy with the call.
“I don’t care if I get fined or not, I think it’s bull,” said Munnerlyn. “There was a sack on the play – he was going down; I even went to the sidelines and looked at the picture. I didn’t have my hands on him when TD wrapped him up. I thought it was a plaster situation and I touched him and then the flag – I can’t believe it. The referee’s explanation to me, when we were going into the fourth quarter was, “I don’t know what was going on, I might have missed that call. I probably messed up.” I don’t think, in that situation, you can say ‘I might messed up,’ that’s a critical situation in the football game and to say ‘I don’t know, I might have messed up,’”
“I think it’s bull.”
Bull or not, the Panthers went from getting off the field to four plays later, allowing the Browns to score a touchdown to take their first lead – a lead that they wouldn’t relinquish. Not to mention one of those four plays was a 51-yard wide receiver counter to Jarvis Landry – the exact play he had scored on earlier.
Clearly, the Panthers hadn’t learned from their mistake.
Up Next: First Half Wind Down
