Two weeks ago, the Panthers were on top of the world – they’d won three straight games, Cam Newton was wearing shirts adorned with Norv Turner’s face on them and there was talk about the Panthers challenging as one of the best teams in the NFC; fast forward two road losses, one of them an embarassing showing on national television in Pittsburgh and the other an upset in which they underperformed and made critical mistakes on all sides of the ball and the Panthers are now clinging to the fringe of NFL relevance.
At least that’s what it appears from the outside.
“I don’t know if we’re down, but the perception of us is down would probably be a more accurate portrayal of the situation,” said the ever-pragmatic Greg Olsen Monday as the Panthers prepare to put their loss in Detroit behind them and focus on Seattle. “You can’t be an up-and-down, emotional rollercoaster in this league to last for a long time and have success, it just doesn’t work.”
“The teams that ride the bad and handle the good the best are the teams that have prolonged success.”
The Panthers still own the fourth-best record in the NFC and are in the driver’s seat for the playoffs – but that’s all dependent on getting more wins going forward, something that Olsen says the team needs to dial in and do right now. While it can be disheartening to look at the firepower they are dishing out in New Orleans, the Panthers don’t have to worry about New Orleans until Week 15.
They need to worry about the 5-5 Seahawks, who are only a single game behind the Panthers for the wild card in the NFC and would be ahead of them after the tiebreaker with a win on Sunday, immediately. A game that two weeks ago didn’t look as if it was going to be relevant will now play a huge part in the race for the playoffs – but Olsen says that getting caught up in the implications isn’t what’s important – winning is.
“We can’t worry about what New Orleans is doing, we’ve got to stop worrying about playoff pictures – we’ve got to just win a game,” said the tight end matter-of-factly. “In this league, it’s so easy to get caught up in ‘if this team loses and this team wins and you get there, we can have home field.’ If we don’t win, we’re not going to be in the playoffs. We’ve just got to narrow it down to we’ve got to win one game and then we can worry about everything else.”
Against the Detroit Lions, the Panthers were expected to find their pass rush, but that didn’t happen according to plan – the NFL rarely does – as Jim Bob Cooter and the Lions offense drew up quick throws to get the ball out of Matthew Stafford’s hands in order to counteract the Panthers’ rush. According to NFL’s Next Gen Stats, the ball was out of Stafford’s hands in an average of 2.4 seconds, the second-fastest of any QB in the league in Week 11.
While they were only able to get to Stafford for a single sack, their run defense may have played better than the final numbers for rookie rusher Kerryon Johnson – 87 yards on 15 rushes and a score – actually show; if you take away three chunk plays in which the Panthers had some overlap redundancy where two players occupied the same gap, Johnson had 12 carries for 40 yards before exiting with a second-half knee injury.
The other Detroit running backs totaled one yard on eight carries.
“When you produce 11 negative plays, primarily against the run, there’s a lot to be excited about,” defensive coordinator Eric Washington said Monday. “I think we’re real close to exactly what we need to do in the run game to support what we need to do in terms of winning the football game – we’ve just got to make sure that those three explosive plays, that we take those things out.”
Washington also extolled the virtues of what the defense was able to do on first and second downs to put the Lions in third-and-long situations that they weren’t able to convert; after a single third down conversion on their first drive of the game, the Panthers got off the field on seven consecutive third downs – all of them third-and-7 or longer. It wasn’t until the final touchdown drive that the Lions converted three key third downs, one of which will likely be the play that Panthers fans point to as the biggest play of the game – a 36-yard completion to Kenny Golladay on third-and-15 in which Matthew Stafford broke out of a collapsing pocket to his right and caught cornerback James Bradberry peeking into the backfield as Stafford heaved it downfield.
Three plays later, Stafford would complete another third-down pass, this one 19 yards for a touchdown – again on a third-and-long and again to Golladay.
“You have to take everything in totality,” said Washington, trying to balance between fixing what didn’t work and continuing what did. “Those things are easy – those things are out there and you can see those things, but we also have to assess and make sure that the guys understand the value of creating negative plays in the run game and what that does for us in terms of putting an offensive in a third-and-7 or a third-and-10+ situation. We have to look at all of that and make sure the guys appreciate the value of those.”
Still, despite the missed tackles, dropped passes and missed kicks, the Panthers were still in a position to win – had Riverboat Ron’s gamble worked, the storyline might be completely different, a 7-4 team that somehow found a way to win one on the road heading back to the cozy confines of their home stadium where they’ve won 10 consecutive games.
But that’s not the way the NFL works.
“There’s a lot of good lessons for all of us, as coaches and players and fans to learn from,” said Ron Rivera Monday. “This game is tough, it’s not an easy game. Things aren’t automatic; things aren’t supposed to happen, they’re not going to happen; if they should happen, you’re going to have to go out and do it.”
Olsen agrees.
“There are no quick fixes in the NFL. It’s too hard. These other teams are good, too – there’s no magic wand…You make your own luck.”
Seattle awaits.
