The Carolina Panthers got manhandled too often Sunday in a 36-28 loss to the Dallas Cowboys, losing one skirmish after another on the line of scrimmage.
Despite that, the Panthers are a little better today than they were Saturday, before they ever played this excellent Dallas team.
Yes, the Panthers (3-1) gave up a shocking 245 yards on the ground to Dallas, allowed quarterback Sam Darnold to get sacked five times and pressured many more and at one point gave up 23 points in a row.
All of that was nasty. Don’t diminish any of that. A lot of Panthers will be sore Monday.
But here’s what is nice if you are a Carolina fan: The Panthers have an outside shot at being 7-1 in a month, and a very realistic shot of being 6-2.
Carolina isn’t a great team. Not yet. Maybe not ever in 2021.
But leading Dallas at halftime on the road? Stopping what looked like a blowout with two fourth-quarter touchdowns? Playing the Cowboys down to the final two minutes when Christian McCaffrey wasn’t in uniform?
That’s the mark of a playoff-contending team. I picked the Panthers to lose Sunday, but that’s going to be the last time I do that for a while. The next four teams Carolina plays — Philadelphia, Minnesota, the New York Giants and Atlanta — are all 1-3 after Sunday and beatable.
You could see Carolina slipping up once in that foursome. But they can get through that stretch at 3-1. That would put them at 6-2 near the 17-game season’s midpoint. Even 5-3 at that juncture would make the postseason doable.
And that’s what the goal should be for this Panthers team. It isn’t going to make the Super Bowl, but it looks like a team that can make the playoffs for the first time since 2017.
It was encouraging for the Panthers the way they came back in this one after trailing 36-14 early in the fourth quarter.
“As bad as it was, and there were some bad stretches, we still had a chance to win at the end,” Panthers coach Matt Rhule said.
Sam Darnold had two costly interceptions, but he also accounted for four TDs (two run, two pass) and threw for 300-plus yards for the third straight game. Give him time and Darnold can play. And those five rushing TDs have come out of nowhere.
Said Darnold of the team’s locker room mood afterward: “I saw a lot of guys that were pissed off, but in a good way. ... We’re not the team that’s just going to continue to look back on it and cry about it.”
Echoed center Matt Paradis, who gave up an early sack: “Losing sucks. No one enjoys it. ... But this team, I believe we have some grit. We have some fire. I strongly believe we’re not going to just go in the tank and be in our feelings or whatever you want to call it. We’ll rally around each other.”
Although an NFL team that just lost a game often says things like that, in this case, it seems plausible. Darnold didn’t crumple Sunday, and he had the chance. He got drilled too often, and that will be the game plan for all defenses playing the Panthers going forward. Yet he looked like a top-15 NFL quarterback, again, and one that is on the rise. When you score 28 on a team like Dallas, you at least give yourself a chance.
The big problem was that the Carolina run defense got exposed, but Dallas has one of the league’s best three offenses. These next four teams don’t have that sort of firepower. Other than Buffalo and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (twice), Carolina doesn’t play anyone else with that sort of firepower.
Although critics will point to Carolina having zero sacks against Dallas after having an NFL-best 14 in its first three games, it wasn’t the pass rush that was the real problem.
It was the fact that Dak Prescott only had to throw the ball 22 times because Dallas kept pounding its way through the Panthers’ D. The Cowboys averaged a startling 7.2 yards per rush, with Zeke Elliott going off for 143 rushing yards. The third-and-longs were few and far between.
But the Panthers had three games before that where they allowed an average of 45 yards per rush. Against a less explosive team — which is almost every team — the Panthers’ rush defense will be OK.
“Our rush defense has been our calling card,” Rhule said. “We were not able to stop the run today.”
Said Burns of the team’s 245 rush yards allowed: “I’m not going to let it define us, but it is embarrassing. So it’s a disappointment to me, because I take that personally. That 245 yards isn’t great.”
No, it’s terrible.
But I’ve seen a lot of bad Panther teams in 27 years of covering Carolina, and this isn’t one of them.
What happened Sunday was predictable, but it wasn’t the start of an avalanche. To take a page out of Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers’ playbook, R-E-L-A-X. The Panthers lost Sunday, but in the larger picture, they’re going to be all right.
