The Carolina Panthers ground game is humming right now.
The team rushed for 216 yards against the Minnesota Vikings, who came into the game allowing less than 80 yards rushing per game; the Panthers almost eclipsed that mark on the first drive of the game when Jonathan Stewart broke a 60-yard touchdown to open the scoring. Sunday marked the third time this season that the team broke the 200 yard barrier and even more impressively, they needed just five weeks to go over the double-century club for the third time this season; the last time the Panthers had three 200-yard games in a single season, it was 2009 and Carolina was deep in the throes of the ‘Double Trouble’ era.
But in 2017, it’s more like ‘Triple Trouble’.
While Jonathan Stewart leads the team with 634 yards rushing this season and had his second 100-yard effort against the Vikings, quarterback Cam Newton stands only 49 yards behind Stewart for the team lead and has led the team in rushing in five games this season. While he started the season out running less, gaining only 90 yards on the ground in his first five games of the season; the lion began to roar on Thursday Night Football when he broke out for 71 yards against the Philadelphia Eagles.
“Three-headed monster of different guys,” tight end Ed Dickson said about Newton, McCaffrey and Stewart. “With all of them, I would say the similarity is you’ve got to maintain your block because they can make people miss like no other. With Jonathan, he can break tackles; with Christian, he’s very elusive.”
“And with Cam, he can do both.”
Some may look at Newton as bailing out the running game with his statistics, but in reality, the quarterback is ingrained in the rushing attack. To look at the Panthers running game and only look at Stewart and McCaffrey, you are leaving out perhaps the most important cog. In the fourteen years the Panthers had been a franchise before they drafted Newton, they rushed for over 200 yards 13 times.
They’ve done it ten times in Newton’s seven seasons.
For all the offseason talk about Newton being asked to scale back his rushing, Newton has rushed 100 times this season and will almost certainly eclipse his attempts for three of the past four years over the next four weeks; it’s not just when Newton keeps the ball, he makes a difference even when he doesn’t.
“I think Cam, his threat of keeping the ball, whether it’s a zone read or just on a bootleg or whatever, I think has helped.”
-Mike Shula
Faking The Vikings
Newton had two key plays in the run game; the obvious was the 62-yard zone-read in which the quarterback kept the ball, juked safety Andrew Sendejo and sprinted down the middle of the field to set up the game-winning touchdown. But it’s not just the play itself that was successful, it was the dozens of zone reads the Panthers have run in weeks prior to keep defenses off balance.
“[Cam] is a viable part of what we want to do and even if he hands it off and carries out his fake, that’s why it’s so important that you fake the ball well,” Ron Rivera explained. “If you’re anticipating him running the ball, you’re going to be a little bit more disciplined and be where you need to be; if you’re not anticipating him running the ball and he goes and he hands it off, you’re going to be downhill and if he doesn’t hand it off you’re going to be out of position.”
“So pick your poison with him.”
The other huge play that Newton had was his role in Jonathan Stewart’s first quarter touchdown run. While the result of the play certainly had to do with a herculean blocking effort from the offensive line, notably Andrew Norwell; perhaps the final detail that turned a first down into a touchdown was the fake bootleg that Newton ran after handing it off to Stewart. This fake bootleg, which the Panthers have run successfully in the past on third-and-short, demanded the safety’s attention. That attention caused Sendejo to drift to the left as Stewart buzzed past him to the right for a touchdown.
60-yard touchdown by #Panthers Jonathan Stewart vs #Vikings after the Case Keenum INT pic.twitter.com/qr1ENxTIk8
— Dov Kleiman (@NFL_DovKleiman) December 10, 2017
That, ladies and gentleman, is how you carry out a fake.
The third part of the puzzle is rookie Christian McCaffrey, who has provided a change of pace from Stewart while keeping the playbook open when he’s on the field. The key to the success of the running game, and make no mistake, the Panthers’ running game has been successful this year, has been the interchangeability of it’s parts. While the statistics may have come in an unorthodox manner and they may have come in spurts, the Panthers still average the fifth-most yards rushing yards per game as a team with 134.5 yards per contest despite playing the top two rush defenses in the league this season in Philadelphia and Minnesota.
“Trust me, you want to have 300-yard passing games and 150 or 200 yards rushing, but that’s the thing I love about this offense and really, this football [team], we’re going to find, these guys find different ways to win and yeah, we want our stats to be better, but we want to come up with a win. However we need to get there.”
-Mike Shula
On October 8 in Week 4 of the season, the Panthers defeated the Lions 27-24 in Detroit but averaged only one yard per carry; 28 carries for 28 yards is not what you want out of your run game. Since that game, they’ve averaged 157 yards per game, including 193.6 in their last five, on the ground and it has started with number one; after having zero yards rushing in Detroit, Newton broke out against Philadelphia four days later and the running game has not looked back since.
“One thing that we have to do, early on, is we have to have success running it,” Rivera says about the importance of their ground game. “I think running the football helps us, it helps every facet of what we do as an offense, it takes the pressure off the quarterback, it adds to your play-action, it can create opportunities for you downfield if you want to throw it if they want to put eight or nine in the box. Get somebody a step or two and the quarterback can unleash it. That is why I think it’s important that you run the football.”
“Whoever we’ve got back there it can be a volatile situation for us in terms of who has the football.”
