When you are so used to riding in the backseat of a car, being in the driver’s seat feels foreign. Visions of cruising with the top down, letting the block watch your hair blow, your rims spin, and the beats from your ride provide the soundtrack of the moment aren’t reality. It’s all a dream.
So when you get control of that wheel and feel the buttery texture of leather between your fingers, it’s not what you’ve been dreaming of. You’re not in the moment because you don’t believe it’s real. You don’t believe that you deserve and have earned that nice whip and everything that goes with it. You’re so used to losing that any win or gain feels uncomfortable and weird.
This is the Carolina Panthers’ inferiority complex in a nutshell. Winning the games they aren’t supposed to feels foreign, so when they are the favorites they revert to the familiar. Their 20-17 loss to the New Orleans Saints in Week 15 isn’t a bit surprising. What it is, however, is disappointing.
The conditions were there for Carolina (7-7) to capitalize and to be firmly in the driver’s seat in the NFC South. Being fresh off a bye week, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are on a two-game skid and facing a Saints team without Alvin Kamara, but the Panthers got in their own way. They blew a 10-point second-half lead and instead of being firmly in the driver’s seat, they are now wrestling with the Bucs for control of the wheel.
Both Carolina and Tampa are 2-2 in the division. The Panthers can still win the NFC South, but they now have to sweep the Bucs. If there’s a split, the Panthers can win the South if they beat Seattle, and if the Bucs lose to Miami in Week 17.
All Carolina had to do was just drive. Here’s what went wrong in Week 15.
11 Flags Over Louisiana
The Panthers committed a season-high 11 penalties for a season-worst 103 yards. To be fair, some of those calls were questionable.
On the Saints’ game-winning drive, rookie safety Lathan Ransom’s hit on Tyler Shough was one such call. To make matters worse, the rookie QB admitted to embellishing it.
“I kind of maybe sold it a little bit because I know we didn’t have any timeouts,” Shough said postgame. “So I mean, it definitely hurt, but I was good.”
Ransom wasn’t the only victim of Shogun’s grifting. Defensive tackle Derrick Brown was also and he expressed his displeasure with the Ransom call as well as his own.
“I think it was a BS call. It was one of those ones where he did it all day. He slid late. So I don’t know what they want us to do.”
Brown also asks that such calls be called conservatively.
“I think it should be up for discretion,” he added. “Not every single time he gets it, it’s like , ‘Let’s make the call.’ None of them (hits) were vicious. I just don’t understand it, but it is what it is.”
To make these questionable calls more infuriating is the non-calls against New Orleans.
When Bryce Young converted a third-and-10 with an 11-yard scramble, there were questions whether or not officials should have flagged Saints safety Jonas Sanker.
Earlier in the game, Cameron Jordan shoved Young out of bounds on another unpenalized play, which provoked left tackle Ikem Ekwonu to retaliate and was flagged for the response.
The Panthers came into Sunday as the league’s third least penalized team before the game. Granted, some calls were questionable, but the ones that weren’t were attributed to the Panthers’ lack of discipline and cohesion coming off a bye week.
Defensive Breakdowns
Carolina surrendered over 300 yard of total offense Sunday and most of the damage was done through the air. Shough threw for 272 yards and completed 24 of his 32 passes, mainly because of miscommunication in the secondary down the stretch.
The Panthers’ defense held Saints receiver Chris Olave to one catch in 3 1/2 quarters, but pulled in four catches on New Orleans’ 78-yard game-tying drive, which included a 12-yard touchdown on a slant route over Jaycee Horn.
In the final drive of the game, Carolina rolled out a prevent look, and Shough capitalized. There were no interior linemen, and the middle of the field was wide open, and the Saints ran a draw play. The Ransom penalty added another 15 yards, stopping the clock with nine seconds left. Field goal. Ballgame.
Safety Nick Scott defends the set, citing that a draw is tough to defend regardless of the situation and package. His concern was how the unit looked after the bye week.
“We looked like we came off a bye, which is never a good thing in this league. We made a lot of mistakes that we weren’t making before, and we just gotta be better,” Scott said. “Whether it’s a bye week or we played a game the week before, it requires so much of us in terms of attention, execution. And the fact of the matter is, we didn’t do that at that level that was required today, and this is the result.”
To Kick Or Not To Kick
The Panthers had a 17-10 lead in the fourth quarter and were in the red zone on fourth-and-one. Panthers head coach Dave Canales passed up a 53-yard field goal attempt from Ryan Fitzgerald, who could’ve made it a two-possession and score game, for a Chuba Hubbard run that was stopped for no gain. In this situation, considering down and distance, it’s hard to pass up a fourth-and-one situation. Fitzgerald’s longest field goal of the season was 57 yards against the Falcons in Week 3.
Fitzgerald has a 50 percent conversion rate on field goal attempts of 50 yards or more. The probability of him converting the attempt, theoretically, isn’t quite the sure thing as Hubbard (or Rico Dowdle or Young) getting a fresh set of downs.
Had Canales chosen the field goal and Fitzgerald missed the attempt, the question would’ve been ‘why didn’t he go for it on fourth-and-one?’
After the game, Canales explained what didn’t need to be explained.
“I couldn’t pass up on forth-and-inches right there,” he said, “I trust my guys to get that done., We’ve been really successful in those situations. The Saints beat us on that play.”
The Panthers have another opportunity ahead as they host the Bucs’ at the Bank in Week 16.
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