Panthers 34, Chiefs 0, Victoria 1

Victoria picks up a Panthers logo before their game against the Chiefs, 10/5/08

Victoria got to go to her first Panthers game on Sunday, and what a game it was. The Panthers killed the Chiefs, primarily on the strength of their running game. It was hot, but V. hung in there. When I get a chance, I’ll add a couple of other photos that she and I took.

Update: Here’s sunset from the evening before. Both of these were shot on my cell phone — not bad quality, all things considered. (I shot them at 1280×960.)

Panthers 24, Falcons 9

Any win is a good win, but today’s win against Atlanta was about as bad a good win as it is possible to get.

The AP this morning was very high on the Panthers’ performance. And, yes, the stats were good, particularly yards after the catch for both Steve Smith and Muhsin Muhammad, which boosted Jake Delhomme’s passing yardage.

But the Panthers were fortunate their 11 penalties didn’t make the game much closer, if not lose it for them. Twelve penalties inside Minnesota’s dome might just barely be understandable given the crowd noise, but 11 penalties in Bank of America stadium is just idiotic. And the football gods aren’t likely to be as forgiving if the Panthers pull a stunt like that again.

That’s particularly true if the team doesn’t get its starting tackles back quickly. Both Jordan Gross and Jonathan Jeff Otah left the game. I think I said before the season that the jobs of a whole lot of Panther staff could be riding on the health of Otah’s ankle — he was recovering from a high sprain in the offseason — and losing Gross for any length of time will damage both run game and passing protection.

Speaking of run game, Jonathan Stewart and Deangelo Williams combined for barely a hundred yards against a defense that spent a lot of time sitting back waiting for the pass. I don’t know whether that was because of the O-line problems or because Atlanta’s run defense was just that good. But it’s troubling nonetheless.

On the plus side, the D held star Atlanta running back Michael Turner to 56 yards on 18 carries. They’ll need to do as well or better against Kansas City, whose Larry Johnson rushed for 198 today as Kansas City didn’t just upset Denver, they beat the snot out of them.

I’m going, and Victoria is coming with me. This will be her first Panthers game, and she’s jazzed. Raise a child up in the way that she should go, and when she is old she will not stray from it.

Of Fusion, Buttercups and Panthers

Fusion: Won 8-1. Minute to minute the game never seemed like a runaway, but that’s what it ended up being. Hooper didn’t score and spent one uneventful quarter in goal.

Buttercups: Lost 3-0. The team lacked energy and quickness, and it didn’t possess the ball much as a result.

Panthers: Lost 20-10 and stunk up the joint in the process. I was doing yard work and didn’t see the game; just as well.

Panthers 20, Bears 17

I caught just the last two minutes and change, the tail end of the Bears’ final drove, when a pass on 3rd-and-1 was broken up by Chris Gamble and a run on the middle on 4th-and-1 was stuffed by at least three Panthers. Apparently the Panthers played crummy on offense for much of the game before Jake and RB Jonathan Stewart pulled together another fourth-quarter comeback. A cheap shot to Delhomme’s head apparently fired the team up, but I didn’t see it.

Next up: Minnesota.

Panthers 26, Chargers 24

Between painting and laundry, I didn’t get to see much of this one. But I got to see about the last half of the fourth quarter, and that was what mattered.

Just as I tuned in, the Panthers went up 19-10 when Chris Harris stripped San Diego TE Antonio Gates, one of the league’s best, of the ball just after Gates caught a short pass. The ball popped directly into the hands of CB Chris Gamble, who ran it 31 yards in for the score.

Then Philip Rivers led the Chargers back with two scores to go up 24-19 with a shade over two minutes remaining. Jake Delhomme looked like this was exactly what he had been working toward as he recovered from last year’s surgery, dinking and dunking down the field. I (and probably everyone else watching) thought the Panthers should have called their last timeout as the clock dipped below 00:15, fearing that the Panthers would get off only one more play. But Muhsin Muhammad called a timeout even before his elbows hit the ground after he was tackled with 00:02 left, giving the Panthers time for one more play. Delhomme made it count, hitting a leaping tight end Dante Rosario in the back of the end zone, threading his pass between the hands of not one but two Charger defenders. It was the kind of high-risk pass he probably wouldn’t have thrown if it hadn’t been the last play of the game.

It reminded me of how Delhomme came in off the bench to throw the late TD to Ricky Proehl in the 2003 season opener against Jacksonville, the game that established Delhomme as the starter and the season that culminated in the Super Bowl. (There was a little more time left when that play happened, of course.)

Observations: For one thing, the Panthers left seven on the table early when they failed to score on a fourth-and-goal from inside the 1. When you’ve got two running backs averaging better than five yards a carry and a completely retooled offensive line, if you’re not going to just run it up the gut then, when will you? A play like that will tell you whether your new toys are any good, even if every Charger and every fan in the stadium knew it was coming. Instead, the Panthers tried to go for the pass and it got knocked down. As that play developed, it looked to me as if Jake could have cut back to his left and run in untouched, but 1) he might not have seen that and 2) the camera angle might have been deceiving.

For another, Rosario’s performance, combined with TE Jeff King’s thoughtless illegal-formation penalty late, might mean the Panthers have a new starting TE. If Rosario can continue to play the way he played today (7 catches for 96 yards, including the game-winner), the Panthers might have found a new starting TE.

Panthers 47, Redskins 3

I only watched long enough to see the score get to 41-0. And that was enough: Wow.

That’s my first reaction. My second reaction had to do not with the Panthers, but with the Redskins: Both of their lines have major, major problems, and to the Redskin D-line add the problem of depth. That does not bode well for their season. The figure 6-8 comes to mind, and that record will leave you out of the playoffs by four games in the NFC East.

The Panthers’ O-line, on the other hand, looks very good, a dramatic improvement from last year. And between Jonathan Stewart, who has impressed as a rookie, and DeAngelo Williams, who showed flashes late last year and has only come on since, the Panthers might just run the ball all day, all season. This would not be a bad thing; for one thing, it’ll help keep Jake Delhomme healthy.

On the other side of the ball, everyone keeps saying Julius Peppers is back. He’s certainly looking better than last year, which is, for the moment, making me look stupid for having said they should release him. Let’s hope this roll continues into the regular season. Deep into the regular season. And then into the playoffs. He’s in a contract year, so he’s got everything to play for. The rest of the D-line looked good as well.

Elsewhere on the offense, Steve Smith’s most dramatic moment came on the first play from scrimmage, where he landed hard on this shoulder and left the game. This team won’t be entirely one-dimensional without him, and with that backfield, third-and-long won’t be the occasion of desperation it was last year, but for this team to play into January, Smith has to stay functional. He’s already had a concussion this season, and a separated shoulder would be misery. Muhammad is out, although he should return for the season opener. D.J. Hackett, who will have to carry the load while Smith sits out his two-game suspension, hasn’t shown much in practice (he sat out last night). And TE Dante Rosario is looking like an upgrade on Jeff King, who, with 47 catches last season to rank second on the team, wasn’t that bad to begin with.

The linebacking corps looked solid, and in Ken Lucas and Chris Gamble, the team has one of the league’s best corner tandems. Chris Harris continues to come on at safety (but also sat last night). And the special teams looked very good as well — four field goals, one from 52 yards; repeated kickoffs into the end zone (short kickoffs were a problem last year) and excellent coverage on those that got run back.

Injuries, or lack thereof, will be key. Knock wood, the Panthers haven’t lost anyone key for the season, which is a departure from recent preseasons. One big key to their Super Bowl season in ‘03 was that the O-line played the same people in the same positions almost every game (and had Stephen Davis in the backfield).

Snoop says he’s “excited” about the Panthers’ chances this year. I won’t go quite that far, but then I never do. I will say that the team had glaring weaknesses at the end of last year, and with one exception — the jury is still out on backup QB, so let’s hope we don’t have to find out about that — the team appears to have addressed them all.

The final preseason game is meaningless for the starters; it’s mainly for the coaching staff to decide whom to keep for special teams, whom to keep for the practice squad and whom to cut outright. The opener at SD will be a strong test, particularly without Smith. That game should show us what we’ve got.

Punching out

So Panthers WR Steve Smith has been suspended for two regular-season games (presumably the first two, 9/7 at San Diego and 9/14 home at Chicago) for punching cornerback Ken Lucas.

Good. And bad.

Good in that, although details were a little hard to come by, it seems as if the punching took place not on the field in the heat of the moment but on the sidelines after the helmets had come off. In other words, there was an element of cold premeditation involved. I don’t care how many Pro Bowls you go to, that’s just not acceptable. It hurts the team, and — oh, by the way — in the real world it constitutes criminal assault. I suspect there may also be a fine involved, and perhaps even a personal audience with team owner Jerry Richardson that begins along the lines of, “Steve, do you want to play here or not?”

Bad in that, in a year on which many of the team’s jobs are riding, this team did not need this distraction. The level of punishment Smith received attests to just how bad this distraction — by which I mean Smith’s behavior, not anyone else’s — really was. I find it telling that, according to my colleague Ed Hardin’s account, Lucas was greeted as a hero in the team locker room on Saturday. Given the normal level of, well, animosity that often exists between offense and defense even on the same team, that suggests that even Smith’s colleagues on offense felt he had stepped over the line.

So good for the team for dealing with this swiftly and, I hope, even more severely than is now apparent. Now, the Panthers need to get their heads in the game. They’ve got depth problems on the D-line, a completely reshuffled O-line to break in and a secondary that needed a shakeout even before Lucas got his nose broken. In other words, their plates are full and Indianapolis is up on Saturday. This team has work to do to ensure that this season doesn’t blow up in their faces before it even starts.

The job marketplace

The New York Giants, clearly displaying a strong reluctance to repeat as Super Bowl champions, have signed QB David Carr. (An acquaintance says it is a one-year, $1.1-million deal, although I haven’t found confirmation of that at the moment and don’t know where he heard that.)

Given the way Carr played for the Panthers this past season, I’d start “Kristen” ahead of him.

Muhammad a Panther again?

Gerald says the Panthers have gotten WR Muhsin Muhammad back from the Bears. Interesting if true. It may yet be true, but I doubt it’s true yet: The free-agent signing period doesn’t start ’til Friday.

If true, what would it mean? Looking past the nostalgia, it’s tempting to think that Muhammad is on the down side of his career. His numbers during his past three seasons in Chicago:

2005: 64 catches, 750 yards, 11.7 ypc, 4 TDs
2006: 60 catches, 863 yards, 14.4 ypc, 5 TDs
2007: 40 catches, 570 yards, 14.3 ypc, 3 TDs

Only the yards-per-catch numbers are really respectable. That said, Chicago’s offense wasn’t exactly pass-happy.

But if his skills haven’t atrophied too much he might still be the kind of big possession receiver who could take some of the heat off Steve Smith. The team still needs another true deep threat, of course.

UPDATE: It’s a done deal, and unsurprisingly, David Carr has been cut. A good move.

Two non-changes

It’s official: Panthers head coach John Fox and general manager Marty Hurney will return in 2008. I’d thought so, but after the team went 7-9 in a year it was expected to reach the Super Bowl, you never know.

Moving in March

If the Panthers want to improve in 2008, they’ve got a lot of work to do.

But as Peter King of Sports Illustrated points out, they’ve got huge constraints (scroll down to “stat of the week”) on what they can do.

As of early December, only three teams — Washington, Baltimore and Atlanta — had less room under the salary cap than the Panthers’ $6.05 million. And if Atlanta can get back some of the bonus money it paid or owes Michael “Inmate” Vick, it will be in even better shape. On top of that, the Panthers have only 35 players under contract for next year, meaning they’ll need to do a lot of deals. Only Arizona, with 34, is in worse shape.

I’ve talked in other posts about what the team’s needs are. Now the question is how to fill them, and what to fill them with. That will take money, and to make that money available, some Panthers, including some fairly expensive ones, are going to get gone.

I don’t have any particular insight into who they might be, but I think two obvious ones are David Carr and Dan Morgan. Carr — and I’ll admit this surprised me — was a disaster as a backup quarterback. It’s hard to imagine any future in football for Morgan after his long record of injuries. (No one remembers this, but he was drafted in part because he had been so durable during his college years.)

While this might strike some as sacrilege, I would also think hard about letting Julius Peppers go. He has a year left on his contract if I recall correctly, but after the year he has just had, I honestly wonder whether he is worth keeping. He clearly hasn’t responded to team owner Jerry Richardson’s call to step up and become a team leader, and for all his natural gifts, I’ve long wondered whether he has the desire to become the player his gifts could make him.

DE Mike Rucker might retire. FB Brad Hoover may well be gone. But however it shakes out, a year after attempting to stand pat personnel-wise, the Panthers are headed toward a major housecleaning.

Jaguars 37, Panthers 6

I didn’t see this one, either, and it’s just as well. Kiss the playoffs goodbye. The question now becomes what the Panthers will do in the offseason to address the team’s serious problems. There are so many of them that this will not be a one-year project.

First, hope is not a plan. We all hope Jake Delhomme comes back from surgery as good as ever, but if he doesn’t, we need better talent than David Carr or (bless him) Vinnie Testaverde as backup. Is Matt Moore the answer? I don’t know, but with playoff hopes out the window, now might be a good time to start finding out. It’s hard to think Moore couldn’t have done better than 84 yards versus what was supposed to be a fairly porous pass defense.

Speaking of the passing game, yet again we see nobody able to step up as a No. 2 receiver behind Steve Smith, who was held to 44 yards on 6 catches. Drew Carter, 4 catches for 26 yards won’t do it.

And the secondary has been a disaster, on a par with the Doug Evans years. It was particularly bad against the run, allowing Fred Taylor an 80-yard TD score. “The scouting report on those safeties was to just run into them and force them to tackle,” Taylor told reporters. That’s a big problem, and one not fixable overnight.

Last offseason, the salary cap made standing pat personnel-wise a virtue born of necessity. In the offseason to come, perhaps it will make shedding a lot of dead weight a similar virtue. This team needs immediate help, and it will take some hard decisions to get it.

Colts 31, Panthers 7

I saw about one minute of this game around the end of the first quarter, but that was it. Just as well. Next, on the road to Tennessee.

Panthers 25, Cardinals 10

I’ll take any win, especially a win in which you pull away in the fourth quarter. Arizona was fourth in the conference in scoring coming in, so holding them to 10 is admirable. But this game was closer than the score indicates. Take away a few big plays and the Panthers were mediocre, in danger of losing to another mediocre team also in quarterback trouble.

The biggest big play was probably Deke Cooper’s spectacular juggling interception with less than 3:30 to play. How that ball stayed off the ground long enough for Cooper to finally secure it will always be an NFL mystery.

Second biggest was the TD bomb to Steve Smith, a score I chalk up directly to poor coaching by Whisenhunt. Memo to him, straight from the 2005 Seahawks: If you want to control Smith, double-team him and hit him at the line. (Not that I am advocating that. By all means, follow Whisenhunt’s example so Smith can score.) Carolina’s other receivers are essentially the same as they were in 2005: incapable of breaking games open if Smith is neutralized. (The one exception might be TE Jeff King, who’s a definite improvement as a target over the now-retired Kris Mangum.)

Here’s the bottom line: If you took away the bomb, Smith’s numbers would have been 9 catches for 61 yards, or 6.8 yards per catch — not even mediocre.

Deshaun DeAngelo Williams’ 75-yard run helped a ton. Take it away, and he still averaged 5.1 yards per carry, better than respectable. But the feature back, Deshaun Foster, managed 2.5 yards a carry. You want that number up around 4.2 or better. For much of the game, the Panthers’ O-line looked like it couldn’t manage to push the Cards’ D-line around much.

Finally, all hail Vinny Testaverde. He looked damn good and probably just bought himself a starting job for the rest of the season. (UPDATE: Not so much, apparently. Which is why John Fox is head coach and I am not.) As my mother the former Latin teacher said, “Vinny, vidi, vici.”

Next: two weeks to prepare for Indianapolis. Reminds me of ‘96, when we had 2 weeks to prepare for San Francisco. Maybe it’ll help. Maybe.

Panthers 16, Saints 13

I’ll take the win, but it easily could have gone the other way. A healthy Olindo “Cripple” Mare likely wouldn’t have had a 30-yard field goal attempt blocked by Julius Peppers, and sending him out to attempt a 52-yarder when he’s too ailing even to do kickoffs strikes me as a questionable decision at best.

That said, the Panthers did muster something of a running game and, well, I didn’t get to watch the whole game, but at least they seemed to be moving the ball.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the rest of the schedule looks very strong — much stronger than it looked in the preseason. Arizona is up next, and they’re 4th in the conference in scoring. The only wins I would bet serious money on the rest of the year are Atlanta and New Orleans again and maybe Jacksonville. We get Dallas on a Sunday night, and the way they’re playing right now, it looks as if the Panthers’ almost unbroken tradition of humiliation on national TV might well be continued.

UPDATE: Jake will miss the rest of the season after deciding to have his elbow operated on. Gosh. Good thing we’ve got David Carr as a backup. And that he’s not wracked with back pain after being sacked yesterday. This is where the O-line has to suck it up and earn its money; neither Carr alone nor Deshaun Foster alone will scare anyone.