With the Perry Fewell tenure in Carolina now upon us, the tone around the final month of the season has changed dramatically.
That doesn’t mean the Panthers aren’t going to try and win on Sunday, but the focus has now begun to move to 2020 – as much as this week is about preparing for Atlanta, it’s also about evaluating where this team is in a number of ways in preparation for the road ahead. So, with that context in mind, what should Panthers fans be looking out for on Sunday?
Turning The Page, Or At Least Starting To
Ron Rivera was clearly extremely well-liked by those who played for him, and while NFL memories tend to be very short, there is going to be something of a hangover, or at least there is a risk of one. This is probably going to exacerbated by the fact that the Panthers’ players know that the people in charge now are unlikely to still be in charge come next season, and so it will be a real test of both the professionalism of the roster and the leadership of Perry Fewell to get the team to go out on Sunday and play like it is just any other Sunday.
David Tepper said this week, in response to a question about whether it might be in the best interest of the team to lose in order to get a better draft pick, that he wants this team to win, but that should not be the only standard of success going forward this season; so the other challenge for Fewell is to get his players to play hard knowing that many of them have nothing to play for other than pride – there may also be some expectation that he won’t look to run his star players into the ground in order to win. Tepper wants to win, but it’s almost certainly true that this isn’t a team that should be doing everything possible to win.
In terms of what this actually means in terms of play on the field, the bare minimum expectation should be that the players look no less prepared than they have been during their losing streak, but if they do get down early, Fewell’s ability to keep heads held high and the effort levels up will also be tested. The NFL is not a sport for the faint of heart, and some players will have an understandable reluctance to put their bodies on the line knowing there is nothing really left to play for – but there’s a game to be played.
How Much Do Rotations Change?
The Panthers spent a reasonable amount of time last offseason talking about how they had learned from last season and were going to look to rotate McCaffrey more in 2019. To say that hasn’t happened would be a colossal understatement. Not only that, but even as the season has started to slip away, Rivera stuck resolutely behind some of his starters; even when games were clearly slipping away, he seemed reluctant to pull stars to both limit the risk of injury and give younger players a chance. While there is still a strong chance that all of the key players continue to suit up, at least for now, the amount of playing time given to players further down the depth chart is likely to increase.
While the lack of carries given to running backs not named McCaffrey is a particularly clear example of how the Panthers might be able to rotate more, giving more playing time to the likes of Ian Thomas, Efe Obada, Jermaine Carter, Christian Miller and others is also something that Panthers fans should keep an eye on on Sunday. Luke Kuechly is still going to play, but if they find themselves down big entering the fourth quarter, it will be interesting to see if Fewell has a different attitude to accepting a lost cause and bring on younger players than Rivera did.
Pass Rush Needs To Get Back To Its Best
The Panthers went into the draft looking to get younger at edge rusher, and they did, drafting Brian Burns in the first and Christian Miller in the fourth. Unfortunately, both players have missed significant time this season due to nagging injuries, which in the case of Burns, have allowed him to be active but have significant limited both his snaps and his impact. However, with both players now appearing to be back to full strength, the Panthers should now hope that they are able to get back close to the unit that was ranked at the top of the league through the first six weeks of the season.
Of course, the pass rush as a whole is going to be limited somewhat due to the injuries to Short, Poe and now McCoy, but this is the healthiest the edge rush group has been for a while, and with Addison and Irvin both hitting free agency after this season, this serves as a great opportunity for the younger players at the position to show why they don’t need to bring them back, and for them to show just how valuable they are to this team. Helping both sides of this particular generation debate is the fact that the Falcons – I thought I should actually mention them at some point in this piece – do not have a good offensive line.
In fact, they have a really, really bad one.
Only six teams (Including the Panthers) have allowed more sacks than the Falcons, and while they can’t quite compete with the league-leading Titans or Dolphins, the Panthers’ pass rush should feel extremely good at their chances of having a bumper pay day. Let’s not forget, those hitting free agency also have something very tangible to play for over the next month.
Kyle Allen Is The Starter?
Rivera made it clear that he planned to stick with Kyle Allen, but not only is Rivera not in charge any longer, but Allen’s continued struggles are going to make it harder and harder to ignore the fact that you have a third-round pick as a backup quarterback whose shelf life won’t last forever. This doesn’t mean that Allen won’t be starting this weekend, but that the change in coaching staff has likely reduced the size of his leash significantly. Whereas under Rivera there was little indication that he was under any real risk of getting benched, a new coaching staff might take a different view and even if he does start on Sunday, a poor start might lead to a change in starter during the game.
This in turn leads to two things to watch for: will Allen show any growth, something which frankly is seemingly less and less likely by the week, and if he doesn’t, what will Will Grier look like? The fact that the Panthers have been so keen to stick with Allen suggests that Grier probably hasn’t been killing it in practice, but there is a long gap between not being good enough to displace Allen under a change-averse coaching staff and not being capable of playing the position at anything like a competent level. Grier doesn’t need to go and make the Hall of Honor from the first snap in order to be viewed as worth consideration beyond the end of the season, but having now had three quarters of the season to get used to the pace of the NFL game, what he cannot afford to do is to go out there and look like a deer in the headlights. In the preseason, it looked as if the pace of the NFL game was too much for him to process having come from a very simplistic scheme in college, but that can only last as an excuse for so long.
Run Defense Needs To Change
The Panthers’ run defense is really bad. In fact, it’s in legitimate contention to go down as the worst ever – while the Falcons aren’t exactly running all over opponents so far this season (they rank 20th in rushing efficiency via PFR), if the Panthers couldn’t stop a Washington team that even after running all over the Panthers still only rank 19th, there is a real chance that there are high school teams in Atlanta that could give them some issues in this regard, let alone the Falcons.
Some of this is due to scheme, some is due to player error and some is due to the fact that their interior defensive line is now looking very depleted with injuries indeed. While it’s unlikely that all three of those suddenly fix themselves with Ron out the door – the last one is pretty much guaranteed not to change – it will be very interesting to see how things do change in this regard, if they do at all. One of the biggest nails in Ron’s coffin over the final month of the season has been that, despite the struggles of the offense and the secondary giving up some big plays, the fact that the run defense that he has personally been overseeing has failed to show any sustained improvement at all – and from a pretty low starting point, at that – is really hard to look past when evaluating his performance as a head coach. There is a very real chance that nothing changes at all, and if that is the case, that only serves to show that yet more changes are needed, but if things do start to pick up it will be interesting to see how they were achieved if nothing else.
This is going to be a very odd game on Sunday, not only because it will be the first game in nearly a decade when Ron Rivera wasn’t standing on the sidelines, but there is going to be a new offensive and defensive playcaller, as well as players who have yet to see much playing time in their careers quite possibly getting a first meaningful runout.
It’s a new day in the Carolinas, and there’s a decent chance that the start is a least a little cloudy, but Sunday should be the first indication of what has changed, and what hasn’t.
