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Carolina did not make a mistake when it let Muhsin Muhammad go three seasons ago.
After Muhammad's sparkling performance Sunday in the Panthers 24-9 victory against Atlanta, however, you are entitled to disagree.
Muhammad was excellent in 2004, the last season in his contract with Carolina. The last year of a contract is like a long audition. He was much better in '04 than he had been the previous three seasons.
So when Chicago decided to experiment with the forward pass and offer Muhammad superstar money, the Panthers couldn't justify matching it. They didn't want to lose Muhammad because, along with catching passes, he was a superb blocker and a leader.
But there are no bailouts under the salary cap, and a team has to spend its superstar money wisely. And the Panthers already had a superstar receiver in Steve Smith. So Muhammad left Charlotte for the Midwest.
After three seasons in Chicago, he signed with the Panthers in February.
If it was acceptable to let him go, it was wise to bring him back. When he arrived in Spartanburg for training camp, he might as well have been on a white horse, with trumpets in the background and the locals dropping to one knee as they threw roses in his path.
Throughout camp, the younger players worked to ensure that every step Muhammad took was downhill. And except for kicker John Kasay and long snapper Jason Kyle, they're all younger than the 35-year-old Muhammad. Teammates wanted his advice and expertise. They wanted to know what he does.
Muhammad knows something. After the game, one of his young sons joins him. Muhammad quietly asks the young man to sit in the chair in front of the locker while the father cleans up and does a quick radio interview.
The kid doesn't move. He doesn't fidget. He doesn't complain. The kid is comfortable for all 10 of the minutes he sits there. Where do you find kids like this? When mine were that age, they would have rifled through the nearby lockers before running onto the field to play catch.
The way everybody defers to Muhammad, it's as if he is Yoda or something.
“Yoda?” he asks.
“A young Yoda,” I tell him.
Young was the operative term Sunday at Bank of America Stadium. Muhammad got open short and long, made the easy catches as well as the ones he had to pluck from the fingers of a defensive back.
He caught eight passes for 147 yards, including a 36-yard fourth-quarter touchdown on which he beat cornerback Brent Grimes with a sweet double move.
“Stuff like that is going to happen,” says Grimes.
It happened all day. Only three times in Muhammad's career has he amassed more receiving yardage, each with the Panthers, most recently in 2003.
So, why here, why now? What do you bring that fits this team so well?
“There's chemistry,” Muhammad says. “Chemistry is the one thing that sometimes people take for granted. You can't just put a team together and expect it to work. When that chemistry is there, it's something that's invaluable. And I think we kind of have that.”
When he went away, the chemistry changed. The Panthers were unable to find or develop a receiver to complement Smith, which freed defensive coordinators to come with a different variation of the same game plan – stop Smith.
If the Falcons came to Charlotte with such a game plan, it failed, as Grimes will attest.
Somebody asks Muhammad if it is gratifying to be “the guy.”
“I am not the guy by any means,” he says. “Smitty … is the guy; he's definitely the guy. I'm the co-host.”
So he's not Yoda. He's Kelly Ripa.
