Of the 125 career games in which Kuechly played (regular and postseason), there was only one other game in which he produced a worse stat line: the 2018 season finale, in which he was pulled after five snaps to rest starters before the playoffs. The rest of his career (save those two games), he averaged 9.35 tackles a game. But that Rams game lingers.
“I had like three tackles, and I was pissed, but we won, so I was like, ‘OK, it’s all right.'”
By that point, Kuechly—the 2012 defensive rookie of the year—had started 22 games in his NFL career. Kuechly had always been one of the smartest and most athletic on the field, a lethal combination. The following Monday, after what felt to him like a dud of a game, he faced the lesson that every guy in the NFL has to learn at some point: do your job.
“(Then Panthers defensive coordinator) Sean McDermott came to me on Monday after we did all of our tape review, watched everything, did everything we needed to do, and he pulled me aside, and he said, ‘Hey, what did you learn from yesterday?’
“And I was like, ‘I got to get to the ball faster. I had no ball production.’ And he just kind of looked at me, and I quickly realized that was probably the wrong answer, and I didn’t have any answers, and he said, ‘No, it’s not really what happened.’ He said, ‘You didn’t do your job, and you were trying to make plays that weren’t yours, and they were hitting in your gap.’
“Nothing was coming my way, early on in the game, and I was getting bored and bored and bored, and then I was trying to reach and make plays in areas that I shouldn’t be, and when I was reaching to make those plays cause I was bored, the ball was hitting where I should have been, and as a result, big plays happen, people looked bad because of my poor play, and McD very, patiently said, ‘You need to make the plays that come to you. That’s all we need you to do.'”