Bad games have a tendency to bring out the worst in a fanbase.
With talk radio and social media abuzz with frustration about Cam Newton, Ron Rivera, Norv Turner, the defensive line and others after the Panthers vexing loss to the Washington Redskins in which they committed three first-half turnovers and fell down 17-0 before rallying back and ultimately losing 23-17 after three incompletions in the red zone with under a minute remaining, Greg Olsen had this to say:
“I’ve think we’ve shown around here that we’ve been a very good offense, so I think a lot of that is the typical overreaction to bad games. That’s the easy way out, that’s the easy critique for people who watching from a distance don’t really have an idea of what’s going on. That’s the easy solution to everybody who doesn’t have much knowledge of what we’re actually doing, so I think that’s careless.”
Whoops.
That’s actually a quote from after the Panthers Week 7 17-3 loss to the Chicago Bears last season in which the Panthers turned the ball over twice in the first half and never recovered from a 14-0 deficit; as fans wrote them off and began debating whether the team should begin tanking for a higher draft pick, the Panthers proceeded to win six of their next seven games to finish 11-5 and make the playoffs.
While the past two weeks has seen two frustrating performances – one of which took a last-second 63-yard field goal from Graham Gano to beat the 1-5 New York Giants and one involved three turnovers and eight penalties for the team that was the least penalized team in the NFL last season – the team is ready to move on.
“We’ve just got to learn from it,” said defensive end Wes Horton. “We came in Monday, watched the film and learned what we can do to be better and grew from it – that’s all you really can do. And now we’re focusing on getting a W in Philadelphia.”
Cam Newton has a similar attitude.
“We’re just in Week 6. Nobody has ever won a Super Bowl in Week 6 nor has lost a Super Bowl, either,” Newton said during his weekly media appearance on Wednesday. “It’s a marathon throughout this whole year and we still have our running shoes on.”
“Everything was all good just a week ago, but now, all of a sudden we have one loss or a loss that we know we were capable of winning the game, then everybody wants to kind of ask questions about deep passes, ask questions about certain players.”
The reality is that only two teams have better records than the Panthers do in the NFC and while the Panthers have some issues – they’ve only run for 99.5 yards the past two games and have turned the ball over five times in that span – a two-week span in the middle of the season does not and will not define the season.
Unless you let it.
“If we take advantage of the opportunity to learn and grow from it, we’ve got a chance to take a step forward. If we don’t, we’ll get beat again,” said Ron Rivera on Monday – Rivera’s team has only lost road games in consecutive weeks once in his tenure as Panthers coach.
Back to Olsen, speaking this week after the Panthers dropped to 3-2:
“You have one team (Los Angeles Rams) that’s undefeated, and everybody else is sort of where we are. If we won yesterday, we’d have the second-best record in the NFL. Now we lose, and all of a sudden the world is coming to the end – that’s this world. You can’t get so wrapped up in it. You have to take each week for what it is – one week is not 16 weeks.”
When the Green Bay Packers started out 1-2 in 2014 with the 28th ranked offense and the lowest completion percentage of his career, future Hall of Fame QB Aaron Rodgers had a simple message for Packers fans – “Five letters here just for everybody out there in Packer-land: R-E-L-A-X. Relax. We’re going to be OK.” While Cam Newton may not have struck the same breezy tone this week, he had the same message – especially when you consider that Newton’s nine touchdowns tie for his career high through five games and his 65.9% is second-best among his eight seasons and the Panthers have allowed the second-fewest sacks in the NFL.
That’s the fewest in franchise history over the team’s first five games.
So when peppered with questions about the Panthers deep ball inefficiency – Newton is 1-for-14 on passes over 20 yards thus far and is averaging 10.3 yards per completion, which would be the lowest of his career by a full yard – or the adjustment to Norv Turner’s offense, the 2015 MVP bristled.
“We good. We are good. I don’t know if these questions are just kind of rubbing me the wrong way, but look, we are good.”
In other words – relax.
