Pat Welter and Chris Lea give their take on the Panthers playoff loss to the Rams and reflect on the season as a whole from Charlotte.

So Pat, the Carolina Panthers almost pulled it out. It was crazy. It really was. I mean, I was believing this building was believing. And you think about a game that starts with Cam Newton. Banging to keep pounding drum. I mean, it sure felt like 2015 in here. It was a beautiful setup for the Carolina Panthers to pull off something magical and spectacular. Everybody said that there was no chance. I mean, so many folks on national television didn’t give the Carolina Panthers a shot at doing this. They came in here 10, 10.5 point underdogs, and they had a lead in the fourth quarter. And literally it took some magic from Stafford and the Rams. They end up getting the win for them to pull it out. That’s amazing. I think one of the craziest things is if you look at the week 13 matchup, everything went right for Carolina to win that game. In this one, everything went wrong to start. They don’t convert the early 4th down, gives the Rams great field position. Bryce Young throws an interception. Then there’s the injuries. Ty Kamawanu, which was significant in the 1st half, JC Horn in the 2nd, and Carolina still just. T 3 points short, which to me is a strong signal that Carolina not only deserved to be in the playoffs, but that they can actually build on this, and this isn’t just a one-year fluke. Let me add to that 24th-down conversions that didn’t happen and you give the Rams the ball almost at midfield. That’s effectively 4 turnovers if you add in the muff punt and also the interception. Games like that earlier in the season, this is stuff I’ve said before. If there’s 1 turnover, there’s gonna be multiple, and then they can’t. Just, they can’t do anything with that. They can’t surmount that. But this team on this game it was able to just overcome that adversity, it really feels like this young team has really started to grow up. So many of these guys, the 1st and 2nd and 3rd year guys, are gonna go into next season with a higher level of confidence knowing that we really should have won that game if we took care of our business. And after the game, both Bryce Young and Dave Canales. Asked about, you know, the fifth-year option and it raises questions of if Bryce Young could be the man for this team going forward. I certainly had my questions, but when you do this in a playoff game and you go toe to toe with Matthew Stafford, who could be the MVP of this league. It gives you hope that he really and truly can be that guy, but I think talking to the players after the game, I asked Rico Dowdell, like, what was your biggest takeaway from the season? He said, well, we were up and we were down. We need to find that consistency. But Derrek Brown. I was going to bring him up if you didn’t staunchly in support of Bryce Young. Yeah, in support also the leadership from Derrek Brown. Like what a guy to have on your roster and also just the fact that nobody held their heads low. They were, they held them high. There’s been so many times I’ve covered this team and you go to the end of the year and you talk to the guys for the last time and it’s almost like, huh, pretty glad this is over. It wasn’t like that this time around, right? It really seemed like, and let me know what you think about it. It really felt like this is a team that felt like they’re going to come back next year and do it even bigger. Well, I think to me it’s just like all the things that Dave Canales tells us in the press conference about the belief within this building. We don’t need to hear about the outside. The championship opportunities, winning the day. All these things are things you post around the building. The difference is these guys have bought in. It’s not like the Matt Rule era where there’s those same kind of things, but they seemed hollow, they seemed empty. But this franchise, these players, they’ve bought into Canales. They have bought into Bryce. This organization is pulling in the same direction for the first time in a long time, and sure, they were an 8-win team that backed their way into the playoffs, but I really do think they can build off this going forward. Absolutely, and I think they put the world on notice and maybe there’s going to be more eyes watching the Carolina Panthers next year.