We’re not going to dwell on this until it becomes a trend
There is a line of demarcation between how fans of the Carolina Panthers felt about the Bryce Young-led offense and the Andy Dalton-led offense under Dave Canales. Largely, that line as created by obvious differences in production and it blurred yesterday with what we are all desperately hoping was an uncharacteristically unproductive performance by Dalton against the Chicago Bears. It doesn’t help that this came one week after fan confidence began surging and we all hailed the advent of a “modern NFL offense” to the Carolinas.
The Panthers started out the game bad. Then they got aggressively more injured than they already were. Then they continued to play badly while the game was effectively out of reach. It felt like a Young game. It felt like a Matt Rhule-and-insert-journeyman-quarterback-here game. It felt familiar, like any Panthers game plucked at random from the last seven seasons.
We’ve all seen bad teams and bad games before. That was certainly a bad a game, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves calling the Panthers a bad team. They aren’t good, to be sure. But they aren’t the league-worst level of bad we’ve gotten used to in the past. Out and out bad teams are not capable of performing at the level we witnessed against the Las Vegas Raiders and Cincinnati Bengals.
So instead of dissecting the game this morning for reasons to feel better about it, let’s just take a breath this week. There are a lot of moving parts that need to settle before we can even pretend to predict what is going to happen in this weekend’s game against the Atlanta Falcons. Mostly I mean that there are a lot of injuries that we need updates on.
The Panthers lost six starters during the game to injuries. That included Tommy Tremble, Taylor Moton, Jadaveon Clowney, D.J. Johnson, Xavier Legette, and Austin Corbett. Reports after the game described their injuries with a wide range of severities. Clowney and Legette suggested they would be back next week. Corbett said he “heard something pop” in his bicep.
It’s no secret that the now 1-4 Panthers aren’t exactly contending for the post season. With eight starters on injured reserve already, the vast majority on defense, and possibly another few looking to join them before anybody comes off that list, Carolina is playing an under-manned brand of football. It’s a brand of football that was designed to evaluate Bryce Young—an evaluation that lasted two games. Now they are moving on to evaluating the rest of the roster so they can build something stronger for next season and beyond. It also might be the most honest attempt at a rebuild the team has attempted under sixth-year rookie owner David Tepper.
Again, let’s all take a beat and at least see who all ends up on injured reserve before we say the sky is falling. Maybe, just maybe we can find the patience to give this offense a few more games before we start calling for heads one year into a new head coaches tenure for the second year in a row.