Chris, the numbers one. 111 play for the Panthers’ offense today that went 15+ yards, just 1. Tyler Sho did a lot better than that. Oh shucks. Let’s get this sucker started. Get dialed in Panthers fans. Here comes an in-depth look at your team. Exclusive interviews locker room insight. Let’s huddle up for Panther’s Playbook presented by Wake Orthopedics, a wake med physician practice. Here are your hosts, Dennis Cox and Chris Lee. Welcome back to another episode of Panther’s Playbook. That’s Chris Lee. Dennis Cox here with you. Panthers Playbook sponsored by Wake Orthopedics. Folks, let’s go right into the comment section. We all know the. Topic today, it’s Bryce Young. How are you feeling? How are you feeling? Are you gonna be a hater today? I’m only gonna point out the fact that he threw for 124 yards, turned the ball over twice, and the only Panthers scoring drive came after a roughing the passer call when he threw an interception on the opening drive of the game. Are you being a hater right now? I’m simply pointing out stats. Chris, you’re gonna be called a cornball again to keep this up. I just wanna let you know that you’re gonna be called a hater again. I am gonna be called a hater, but let’s be honest, the thing that we have been talking about over the last few weeks to go back to the game against the Jets, go back to even the game against the, the Green Bay Packers, is that you can’t sustain success playing with an offense that is relying on simply one dimension that’s running the football. It’s good to be a run from first football team. I have zero issue with that, but when that’s not there, what are you? And that’s a question that we brought up weeks ago. If you don’t have a run game, what are you? You just lost to a team that was starting a 2nd round quarterback for the 2nd game in a row. That’s the 2nd career start. It was a 2nd round pick and you lost to that team 17 to 7 today. And again, the only touchdown came after Bryce Young threw an interception but was play was overturned because of roughing the passer call and. And that roughing the passer had nothing to do with the interception that ended up happening. It would, it would have been an interception and he threw another bad pick later in the game. And then I’m not even gonna put the, the bad exchange on with him and Jimmy Horn. I actually put that on Jimmy Horn Junior. I don’t put that one on, but it has happened, but it still happened nonetheless. This offense is, this, this, this offense is nothing if the wrong game isn’t going, Chris, plain and simple. So here’s the thing, like, you know, we were looking ahead and we, we’re a part of it. We’re like, hey, they can win this one, they’re 6 to 4 if they can win. Next week they’re 7 and 40 my gosh, it’s all looking good right now when the Carolina Panthers had some expectations they couldn’t deliver and we realized that Rico Dowdle’s great run, uh, no pun intended, since, uh, the Miami game has only been a band-aid for what is already a bad offense, right? The Panthers are bottom three in the NFL and passing yards per game. This game brings down. the average just a little bit, but it was already there. There’s nothing that was gonna happen in this game to make it shoot up or shoot down. It kind of is what it is right now, 10 games into the season. So that’s not hate. That’s not trying to pick and choose. It is what it is. One of those games, OK, that’s not on Bryce because he didn’t play, but 9 of them, including this, uh, performance with 124 yards yards, uh, for Bryce, it really shows you kind of what. The Panthers are absolutely missing, and we’ve said this a few times. If there is a better quarterback and we’re not dissing Bryce Young and what he’s, what he could possibly do, maybe the receivers need to be better. Maybe Dave Canalis needs to be better all true maybe the system needs to be better and this isn’t the system that fits him, but ultimately at the end of the day, who does this come down on? This quarter this comes down on a quarterback and you were this team. Moved up in a draft 8 spots to get you traded away 2 1st rounds, 2 seconds, DJ Moore. And this is what we’ve gotten. You could have gotten this with a backup and so excuse me if you feel like we’re hating on them. But it kind of is what it is at this point. You could have gotten 3rd worst passing team in the NFL with a backup. You could have brought Jacoby Brissett in here to do the same thing. And could have had the same results so far 5 and 5. At what point does the quarterback play above the deficiencies of the team? And so that’s the part that, you know, there’s other things to really work on for sure, um, but at the same time like you really have to call what it is and Bryce Young is just not playing really good football right now and. At what point did the excuses stop? Yeah, I mean, like you said, we’re, we’re 10 games in 9 starts for Bryce. 8 of his 9 starts has been less than 200 yards passing. That’s a large enough sample size. You remember the, I, I. The Jets game 5.5 yards per attempt. The Green Bay game, 5.1 yards per attempt. This game, 5 yards per attempt. 5 yards per attempt. That doesn’t win in this league. It just simply doesn’t. You can’t sustain success in this league for, for a quarterback that goes for 124 yards. Yeah, you’re able to sneak away and get a win like a lot of it because of Rico down on defense. Last week against Green Bay, but guess what? The run game wasn’t fully there this week. We, we know how this Panthers team has to win games and so does the rest of the NFL. I mean, I’ll give, I first of all, I’ll give the defense credit, by the way. Yes, they gave up a couple of big plays. Defense only gave up 17 and 7 of those points was after a Bryce Young interception in the 4th quarter. You only gave up 17. Defense did their job. I was also a big fan of Nick Sporting today. I really was. Overall, listen, like we could talk about the defense, but like there was a crucial point in the game where the, the Saints could have like jumped up and doubled up the score. We’ll talk about that in a second, but I wanted to add on something when we talked about this offense, right? We were talking about this in the press box. The points that the Panthers have scored now again I called Rico Dado a band-aid just a few minutes ago. He masked a lot. He masked a lot of deficiencies that’s with this team. You can look at those games and say, man, they scored 27. Man, they scored 24. 0 wow, they had 30 points against Atlanta. All right, take those games out of it, right? Those are 3 wins. The only other game that they score over 20 points. Was when they had 22 versus the Cardinals, right? And that’s coming back at the end where Cardinals are basically playing a prevent defense so we’re just, we’re just trying to make sure we keep you in front of us and we know we got this win at the end of the day. Other than that, Jaguars game 10 points. Uh, we talked about the, uh, Falcons game, uh, Patriots game, 13 points. One of those drives was an Andy Dalton drive at the very end. Jets game 13 points. uh, Bills game 9 points last week versus the, uh, uh, Packers 16 points. This offense does not in the door and when we were talking about the Atlanta game where I was saying, hey, Atlanta really gave it up like there Atlanta was not from coaching to quarterback to. Uh, you know, to the, the players on, on the team, like they weren’t in it and the Panthers also and that one of them was a pick 6 so it’s, it’s like you, you’re looking at all this and what they have going on and like this offense is not moving the ball at all if it’s not from Rico Dado. That is a problem we were told the deepest, uh, the deepest, uh, you know. I guess uh uh a persistent group on his team was wide receiver. Where are the results? Hasn’t been there. Where are the results at some point this is what we were told at the beginning of the season, and we have seen the comments whether it’s, you know, social media here on YouTube. We’ve seen the comments from people talking about like, well, we’re the actual receiving threats. I’m sorry, Coker is a good receiver. Tenroll McMillan’s the #1. All right. Some people say, Well, he’s actually a #2. OK, fine. He’s still a starting caliber receiver on this team, but he eventually is a first round pick. No, that’s a different conversation at the time, but at some point you expect your quarterback, no one overall picked to help elevate the players around him if you pick somebody. In the first round though, so even if, even if he’s not that it still goes back to what they saw in him. So like we’re not just talking about Xavier by himself this is also what the coaching staff feels about him. This is also what the front office feels about him. There’s some failures all around here to point out when it comes to this, and again I’ll bring up the stat that we split off with. You had one play. Of 15 or more yards, you know, it was a 26 yard reception by Tedderrolo McMillan. The next longest offensive play, we’re two roughing the passer calls. Those are the next two longest plays, but really offensive player was a 14-yard run by Rico Dado. That’s it. There isn’t a whole lot. This, this team has struggled. We’ve seen it this whole season. This isn’t just, uh, hey, we’re just reacting to one game. We’re 10 in. This team doesn’t push the ball down the field. You don’t have a quarterback that can push the ball down the field on a consistent basis. You saw Tyler Shuck going deep to Chris Olave. Tyler Shuck was the best quarterback on the field today. Tyler, Tyler Shuck, a second round quarterback making his second career start, threw for 282 today and wasn’t afraid to push the ball down the field. It’s, it’s amazing. I was talking to other people in the press box and you see other teams go deep, you’re like, whoa, what is, what’s that? This again, we have seen it time and time again. This is a consistent thing we have talked about even in wins, you can’t sustain winning like this, especially against good teams, let alone a team that just got its 2nd win. Bryce’s last 3 starts get 13 points against the Jets, get 16 points against Green Bay. Gets 7 against the Saints. That’s a combined total math 36 points in the last three starts for Bryce Young. 36. There are teams that score more than 36 in one game. You did it in 3, and two of those games were against teams that now have combined 4 wins. The Jets got their second win today, as did the 6. I mean, nothing much really to add from that when it comes to the offense. I, I do wanna show some love to the defense though because it’s gonna be very easy to pile on JC Horn, um, you know, he struggled today, uh, fell down twice. One, he says he was pushed, the other he slipped. Both of them ended up being touchdowns. But let’s take out the last touchdown, uh, you know, because you’re giving the Saints the ball on a short field after an interception. And once again, to point this out. Besides the Packers, what was it, not the Packers, the Jets game, what was the game when he had one turnover? But Bryce had one turn anyway, we, we said if he’s gonna have one turnover, he’s gonna have 2, so this before he kind of broke that this game two turnovers because the fumble goes to him and then the interception, um, but the defense, um, if you take away that one touchdown right there because they got the short field, the defense really had an opportunity to really give this up in the second quarter when the Panthers weren’t moving the ball, it was consistent 3 and outs. The Saints had opportunities to come down and score whether it’s uh uh field goals or whether it’s touchdowns and the defense held them and they really could have in that last two minutes come in possibly scored, going up 17 to 7 then and then come back to start the second half, score a touchdown and be up 24 to 7 then. It could have really been out of hand, but the, the defense held that all together. It wasn’t until Bryon gave the ball up and again I’ll say this, and this is not a knock on the defense. It’s just more so like where things are talent wise. I like the roster, but this team, as we said, it’s not built to withstand, uh, turnover. No, they’re not. They did it against Miami, but Rico Dado had over 200 yards rushing. That is a different situation, right? After that man like what’s what’s happening? Like who else is gonna step up for this team uh to make things happen you can’t always rely on the defense to get turnovers or to uh or to score themselves the offense has to do their job and the offense has not been doing that. Let’s actually go to the locker room one of those those leaders in the team leaders in the locker room, Cuba Hubbard, talk about the struggles of the offense. Yeah, I mean I just said I’ll give credit to the Saints I thought they played a great game uh they’re flying around um doing a bunch of different things to disrupt the run. I also think, uh, on our side of the ball that we just gotta be better um just get back to what we know what to do or what to do best and that’s run the ball and do our things and it’s not always gonna be pretty um like it’s it’s hard to run the ball it’s hard to win games in this league so um as long as we just continue to play our style of ball it’ll all work out so. Um, obviously losing sucks, but we’ll be all right. Chris, something that happened today as well, obviously, the Panthers losing, but I guess you could say it’s fortunate that looks like Tampa Bay losing to the New England Patriots. So that’s good, I guess. The Panthers are still one back in the division in terms of the win-loss column, but this loss obviously sets them back because it’s a divisional loss. But someone else, Derrick Brown in the locker room, Chris, was a little animated. Go do some editing here. But he says, hey, you know what? It’s still one game at a time. One on one in division we’re sitting at 500 so if we mess it up it’s on us so we gotta go out here and do what we gotta do in order to make those things come true. Again, sorry for the edits and the bleeps they’re having me put in for Derek Brown, but Chris, I, I do appreciate Derek Brown’s honesty. Yeah, I really do. Derek Brown, he’s, he’s been straight with us in the in in the locker room after every single game we’re in our loops, he’s been straight with us in the locker room. I mean you can feel the frustration um one thing I will say though um. You still know that this team going into the locker room knows that they are better than what they showed today. There’s not gonna be many times that. You know we’ve said this before that in certain games it feels like the players are playing above the coaching staff in some ways um you’re not gonna be able to do that all the time. Now Kellen Moore came in here with one hell of a game plan and 1 year head coach once again for the 2nd time this year whooped Dave Canalla’s butt when it came down to coaching. Like, they came in with a game plan, they came in with, uh, with the way to control the game. And that is first off that is a bad team because any, any other team, uh, that’s, you know, just a little bit better would have scored at least 30 points in this game versus the Panther. They got a couple dudes, let’s be honest, they got a couple dudes, and so that’s also part of the difference too. They’ve got some home even though the, the, the, the team is bad, they’ve got home run hitters on defense and on offense, which is helping to keep them in it and they only have two. Two wins this year and one of them is here at Bank of America stadium. Um, there’s, there’s a long hard look that I think the Panthers gonna have to have with themselves on who’s gonna stay on this roster, uh, at the end of the year, how do you make things better, but then also. How do you get coaching better? How do you get the quarterback position better? How do you come into games when you have the advantage? First time the Panthers have been, uh, favored by more than a score, right? Favor 5.5 and 5.5, right, more than they were, they were favorites at the Jets, but that was only 1.5, 1.5, so they’re, they were favored by a score first time that that’s happened since week 3 of 2021. Right, that’s been 4 years. How do you handle success from now on? How do you come into a game to handle success? Because if you want to get to the point to where success is, is not just coming in and just, you know, making sure you’re winning part of it is, I mean that’s a big part of it, but it’s, uh, what I’m trying to say is like. When you have success, you have to handle the success you have to follow up a good show with another good show, you know what I’m saying? You have to validate why you’re here and you have to also to talk in basketball terminology, you have to make your layups. This is still an NFL team. This is a lay up with a 7 footer in front of you, but he’s not gonna block your shot and ain’t jumping. He’s not jumping more than likely he, he’s gonna foul you and you didn’t know how to draw that foul and make the lay up and go to the line. And that’s, that’s kind of what happened here with the Carolina Panthers. My final thought is this, Chris, I, I, in, in the postgame we were in there and Dave Canalas was asked multiple times about Bryce Young and Dave fell on the sword, didn’t throw his quarterback under the bus. Uh, I, you know, that’s what a leader’s supposed to do. Euro stepped it, the Euro stepped it, but one thing that was frustrating, I know Mike Kay, the Charlotte Observer, asked us about the lack of vertical plays in this offense, and Dave said. It’s something we’re continuing to work on. I posted that video on social media at the fan rookie, and now I’ll give a credit to one of our listeners who said this. My apologies for, for not saying who it was right now. I can’t remember who it was, said it’s 10 weeks into the season. Either you have it or you don’t. There’s a large enough either you have it or you don’t, and guess what, this scene doesn’t have it. Is there anything else to say? Leave comments, folks. Make sure you subscribe. Hit the like button hype it again vent, we’re here for you folks. Folks, come here, Chris. Come here. We’re here for you. We’re here folks right here for you because we understand this is frustrating listen OK? we’re here for you. I was that much of a Panthers hater. I’ll be wearing if I was that much of a Panthers hater, I’ll be wearing panther socks. He’s wearing Panther socks, folks. I’m wearing pans or socks, he is. OK. We want to cover a winning team. We genuinely do. I grew up loving this team since ’95. I moved to the state of North Carolina in 2011. I have loved this team. Oh Cam’s rookie year, man. I remember, I’ll, I’ll remember, gosh, man, I was sitting at home, my, my apartment in Fayetteville, the Ville watching Cam Newton drop over 400 against the Cardinals. I’m just playing and then over 400 against Green Bay this first two games. I was like, yeah, I’m in. OK, 400 in the two games each man 800 yards. How long, how many games would take Bryce to get 800 yards? 6? We’ll see you on Thursday.
