To say that the Carolina Panthers have struggled on offense in their first two preseason games would be a bit kind. But instead of being more accurate and saying that they’ve repeatedly left a bowel movement right smack dab in the middle of the bed, we’ll just keep it clean and stick with that.
Luckily for them (and whoever cleans their sheets), head coach Matt Rhule revealed that the team isn’t rolling out all their offensive looks just yet. And why would they? It’s the damn preseason!
“We’re just gonna run our base stuff. We didn’t have like the goal-line packages out there and all those different things,” Rhule said of the failed red zone trips in the 20-3 loss to the Baltimore Ravens. “We want our guys to get their pads down, we want Chuba [Hubbard] to try to run through some contact, go score. It’s not really something we’re game-planning it and trying to be tricky. We’re trying to run good, old fashioned football plays.”
The Panthers managed to trek down as far to the Ravens’ 1-yard line on their first offensive possession following a Haason Reddick interception. They were denied, though, as Hubbard could not punch in any of his three attempts for the yard and the touchdown.
“Those coaches worked hard,” Rhule added. “They’re trying to keep it very beige. We don’t wanna show like ‘Hey, here’s out double reverse this, here’s our trick play that.'”
Carolina mustered up all of eight first downs and converted on just two of their 11 third-down attempts. Between tonight and last Sunday in Indianapolis, the offense has picked up the markers on five of their 25 third-down situations.
That’ll certainly improve, however, as offensive Joe Brady rolls out more of his creative stuff in the regular season. Also, you can’t really be much worse than that, so it’s going to get better.
