Panthers offensive nightmare continues

I”m going to assume that last week was a fluke and the Panthers we’ve been seeing all year came back to their usual pathetic state today. It was truly a horror show on offense for Carolina today as they failed to get hardly any drives going and ended up losing 20-10 to the St. Louis Rams and it could have been a lot worse had the defense not played well.

I’ll just post the offensive numbers because I’m already pretty bad about the game and I think the numbers will speak for themselves.

201 total years
8 first downs
25 total rushing yards
4 turnovers (3 INT’s 1 fumble)
1 possession in the red zone

There’s so many ways I can define this shitshow of an offense but I’m just going to call it an abomination for now. Matt Moore threw three interceptions as a result of poor decisions. First one coming off a flea flicker which he LOBBED towards Steve Smith and it was intercepted by James Laurinaits. The last interception was similar to what he was doing earlier in the year. Awful decision to sling a pass downfield to Steve Smith instead of going for a better option. Remember how we thought David Gettis would be our X factor this week? He had zero catches today. ZERO. Steve Smith was responsible for most of the receiving yards and he had a couple of drops as well as a horrible fumble. Brandon LaFell made a few nice catches and was one of the few solid players on the offense.

Moore looked like he did in the Giants game where he looked confident when he was completing passes and moving the chains. That only happened inside the two minute warning in the 1st half and the 2nd to last drive where we scored a TD. Aside from that, he looked like he usually does. He panicked too early, threw awful passes and made terrible decisions. I really thought he could build off of his performance last week but I guess I was wrong.

Jonathan Stewart had another rough game only rushing for 30 yards on 14 carries. I felt we should have given him the ball more but he is clearly not playing well and I don’t know what is wrong with him this year. The offensive line certainly didn’t do him any favors though as they were brutal today. Matt Moore was sacked three times and Chris Long was in Moore’s face all game.

It was more of the same from the defense. The Rams were running a lot of short yardage plays with the longest one being a 33 yard pass to Brandon Gibson. There were definitely a lot of coverage issues in the secondary as Sam Bradford completed 4 or more passes to 4 different receivers. I mentioned in the preview that Danny Amendola was the one he went to most and he found him 6 times, one of which being a TD and he was his favorite target in the red zone. I also mentioned that Brandon Gibson would be a possible threat and he was. Bradford just kept finding open receivers and slowly chipped away at the Panthers defense and they put enough points on the board to win the game. It helped the the Carolina offense has been playing at an abysmal level so 20 points were all they needed.

I felt the defense did a fine job of keeping the Panthers in the game for awhile but they can only do that for so long. If the offense doesn’t do anything then it’s very difficult to win. The defense did hold Steven Jackson to only 58 yards on 23 carries and James Anderson had a nice day but that can only take us so far. We didn’t force any turnovers and the game could have been a lot closer if we did.

Then of course, I have my issues with the play calling and coaching as usual. Starting the game off with a flea-flicker was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. Then there were the constant deep passes despite only being down 10-3 and getting us in an even bigger hole. I also hated the decision to try an onside kick after making the score 20-10. We, obviously, didn’t recover it but held the Rams to a 3 & out and they pinned us inside our own 5 with the punt. We had 2 timeouts left at the time and could have kicked it away, held the Rams and then forced a punt to get better field position. You only try an onside kick when you’re down by one score. Awful, awful decision.

In the end, the Panthers are 1-6 and I said earlier in the year that they are a 4-12 team AT BEST with the way they were playing. That’s what I saw out there today, an awful team. The silver lining is that we will get a high draft pick this season. It’s a rough season because the team really should not be this bad but they are. All we can do is wait for the real rebuilding process to start and hoping that we won’t see these piss fucking poor efforts from the offense. I thought we really had some improvement last week but we ended up taking 5 or 6 steps back today with this game today.