Let’s play a game and jump in the wayback machine.
It’s August. It’s 100 degrees and humid as heck – the back of your shirt is soaked. Lizzo wasn’t a household name and Jack Nicholson was still your favorite Joker. You’re drinking a non-pumpkin beer and talking about what the Panthers season will look like after the bye week and I paint you this picture: Cam Newton has missed four games, Kawann Short has had season-ending shoulder surgery and the Panthers have already started three different players at left tackle. Donte Jackson and Trai Turner have both missed the past three contests and Chris Hogan is on IR.
Oh, and they’re heading to San Francisco the week after the bye to face an undefeated 49ers team. Gulp, right?
Not so much.
“Our guys are resilient,” said Ron Rivera as his team returned from the bye riding a four-game win streak. “I think we’re kind of understanding who we are and what we can potentially be as a football team. We’re still a ways away – we’ve got a lot of work to do; that’s one of the neat things about having the bye where we had it, after six games, getting an opportunity to go back and evaluate it – there are some things that tell us that we still have room to grow.”
“I just think that we’re headed in the right direction, [but] we’re not where we want to be.”
While it hasn’t been the way that the Panthers expected, the Panthers are 4-2 heading to the city by the bay with one of the best defenses in the league and an MVP candidate at running back in tow – let’s take a look at how they’ve gotten there and the storylines they’ll face as they head into the second half of their season.
No more breaks. No more weirdly scheduled weeks – every game after the matchup this week in San Francisco is a Sunday game at 1p Eastern – at least until the NFL decides to flex one of the matchups with the Saints to primetime.
Just ten more games to decide which road the 2019 season – and likely the Panthers future – will travel down.
QB Questions
While the national media has focused on what will happen when Cam Newton will return, the coaches at Bank of America Stadium are content to continue to utilize Kyle Allen – who has played the role of game manager throughout the Panthers four-game winning streak – until Newton is completely healthy. Questions about when exactly that is, what completely healthy looks like and whether or not the ‘hot hand’ of a quarterback that hasn’t lost a start in his career getting the nod over a returning franchise-defining quarterback is worth considering are issues that the Panthers are content to push into the hypothetical future.
“We’re not putting any pressure on Cam, he’s doing a great job doing the things that we’ve asked of him,” Ron Rivera said Monday. “He’s gone above and beyond as far as working with our quarterbacks and helping them along the way…until I get something else given to me by the trainers and the doctors, he’ll continue to do his program.”
“Cam has been tremendous, he’s done exactly what’s been asked of him; he’s done the things that he’s needed to do to rehab and go through this. It’s been very difficult on him – here’s a guy that’s a very competitive young man. But at the end of the day, we’ve got to be smart, we’ve got to make good decisions going forward and as things progress, we’ll let you guys know.”
Allen, who has thrown for 901 yards and seven touchdowns with a 65.6% completion percentage in four games, has benefited from 23 sacks and 14 takeaways – including seven of each in their Week 6 win over Tampa Bay in London – over the past four games as well as 661 total yards and seven scores from Christian McCaffrey. But the Panthers are happy with the growth they’ve seen from Allen over his four starts, especially trying to solve his biggest issue – putting the ball on the ground, as he did six times in his first three games.
“The more and more he gets to work with the group, the more and more he plays, the more comfortable he gets, the more his confidence is built,” said Rivera about Allen. “You see his quick decisions, you see quick feet and that’s been huge and the one thing I appreciated – knock on wood – he’s learning to protect the ball better.”
For now, the only question – who will be the starter in San Francisco – has already been answered as Kyle Allen will remain the starter for another week.
CMvpC?
After a week off, NFL fans – especially those outside of Carolina – may have forgotten the insanity that has been the first six weeks of Christian McCaffrey’s season.
Through six weeks, he led the league with 618 rushing yards – even with a game less than Leonard Fournette and Dalvin Cook, he sits in third place and only 107 yards behind the league leader. He also has 305 receiving yards on 35 receptions, leading the Panthers in both categories. He accounts for an astonishing 43.6% of the Panthers’ offense thus far this season and is on pace for over 2,400 yards from scrimmage and 24 touchdowns – in his 2012 MVP campaign, Adrian Peterson had 2,314 yards and 13 scores.
He was the first player since Jim Brown to have over 175 scrimmage yards in three of his first four games – and then he did it again in Week 5, including the longest run in Panthers franchise history as he sped 84 yards for a score. McCaffrey will just continue to quietly stack the yardage, records and touchdowns while the rest of the league focuses on QBs.
“Obviously, the league is very skewed toward quarterbacks,” Greg Olsen, who has 22 catches for 278 yards on the season, said after the game last week in London. “This league is very quarterback-driven, so everybody understands those dynamics. But Christian’s impact on our team, his impact on what he’s done over the first six weeks of the season, to anybody who is watching, it’s pretty evident the impact he’s had.”
He’ll face his stiffest test in San Francisco, where the 49ers boast the #1 defense in the NFL in terms of yardage allowed – but during their 6-0 start, they haven’t faced off against a player like McCaffrey.
Up Next: The Defense Is REAL
