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"It's desperation time."
That's what Panthers linebacker Jon Beason told me this week when we were talking about Carolina's road game tonight against Dallas on "Monday Night Football."
And sall their momentum headed exactly the wrong way.
But does this Panthers team have the stuff to right the ship?
Tonight, I believe, will be one of the pivot points of the Panthers' season. Every NFL season has about three to four of these sorts of games - places where the season leaps north or plummets south.
Those sorts of games are more apparent in retrospect. In 2008, the Panthers' main pivot points were the opening-game upset of San Diego (north), the Monday night game against Tampa (north) and the 20-point playoff loss to Arizona (wa-a-a-ay south).
That Arizona game, in fact, sent the Panthers so far south that they have yet to recover. It's like they flew to Mexico, forgot their passports and have been stranded in a seedy hotel in Tijuana ever since.
If you're keeping score - and, of course, that's what football fans do - the Panthers have now lost one postseason, four preseason and two regular-season games in calendar year 2009.
Tonight they give it another go, and this time the scoreboard and everything else will be Texas-big. The new, $1.15-billion Cowboys Stadium has everything from Frito pie to $75 parking spaces to the most stunning replay video screens you will ever see (I am really hoping a punt blasts into one of them tonight).
This is the stadium you know Cowboys owner Jerry Jones just had to have - a place that can hold more than 100,000 people and looks like a spaceship from the movie "Independence Day."
And man, those Texans love their Cowboys. I know what they're like, as I was once one of them.
When you're born in Texas, they hardwire a love for the Dallas Cowboys into your soul.
I was born in Austin and lived there until age 9. On Sundays, I would either put on my Roger Staubach No.12 jersey or my Calvin Hill No.35 jersey and watch the Cowboys on TV. They were "America's team," the announcers kept saying, but deep down I felt they were mine alone.
The playoffs were a birthright for the Cowboys back then. The Super Bowl was always a possibility.
But these Cowboys have fallen on desperate times. They haven't won a playoff game since the 1996 season, a streak helped along by Carolina whipping the Cowboys in the playoffs twice. And the new stadium hasn't helped matters so far. Dallas lost its opener there a week ago when Tony Romo threw three interceptions.
The new Dallas palace, for all its bells and whistles, still contains a 100-yard field. Tonight's game will be decided more by two men - Romo and Panthers quarterback Jake Delhomme - than anyone else.
Both teams, then, feel Beason's air of desperation. The question is which one feels it most keenly and can harness that feeling most effectively, turning desperation into exhilaration before the season slips away.
Scott Fowler: 704-358-5140; sfowler@charlotteobserver.com; twitter.com/scott_fowler
