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At about 3 p.m. Sunday, Panthers head coach John Fox was:
The subject of a speculative FoxSports.com report that claimed the coach had told some of his friends and associates he expected to be fired at the end of this season.
Trailing the Washington Redskins 17-2 midway through the third quarter.
On his way to an 0-4 start at Carolina and, most likely, a heated conversation with some of his "friends."
But Fox is the Panther with nine lives. He has now survived longer than Dom Capers and George Seifert put together here, and he survived again Sunday.
His Panthers got a monstrous break on a weird special-teams play, played resilient football late and scored the game's final 18 points to beat Washington, 20-17.
It all put Fox in such a good mood that he showed a slice of his unvarnished self in his postgame news conference – the part that he generally hides from all cameras. Defiant in tone and delighted with the day's result, Fox laughed away the Foxsports.com report by first joking: "You mean my network?"
Then, he denied the report by saying: "I think if I was talking to my friends I would probably tell them I expected to get a five-year contract. But I don't think I'd be telling them that I'll be getting fired at the end of the season."
Normally, Fox takes matters like that so seriously you would think he was talking about nuclear disarmament. Instead, he made a little joke. Good for him. And if Fox actually did say anything like that to any of his friends, of course, and then they leaked it – nice friends, huh?
Of course, no one really knows what Panthers owner Jerry Richardson will do on any given day – not his own sons and not his employees. It's still possible Fox will be fired by Richardson at the end of this season, but it would have been more possible if the Panthers had started 0-4.
Instead, Carolina finally won a game for the first time in 287 days, outscoring Washington 11-0 in the fourth quarter and making it more likely that Redskins coach Jim Zorn beats Fox to the unemployment line. The Redskins were the one who muffed a punt that led to Carolina's winning TD, couldn't tackle Jake Delhomme on a bizarrely beautiful bootleg and couldn't hold that 17-2 lead.
Afterwards, Fox could barely contain himself. He celebrated on the sideline and later did the whole "I love my players" routine that sounds so much better after a victory.
"It's not the way you draw them up," Fox said, "but it's a big character win."
Fox mockingly called himself a "dumb head coach" for going for it on fourth-and-goal from the 1 in the second quarter.
I've criticized him incessantly for not going for it enough on fourth down in years past, and so I liked this call. Even though it didn't work right away, it ultimately came out fine, as Carolina ended up tackling Clinton Portis for a safety two plays later.
Fox even invoked the Panthers' Super Bowl appearance of 2003, which he is prone to do at every opportunity.
"We haven't had many three-game losing streaks around here in seven or eight years," Fox said of his tenure. "The last one I really remember was our Super Bowl year."
Well, actually, the Panthers also lost six in a row in 2004, four in a row in 2006 and five in a row in 2007.
But let the coach slide for not having history at his fingertips.
Let Fox have this moment. The Panthers have had very few of them in the past 10 months. There will be more calamities in store for the Panthers later this season – they still have dozens of problems. But they also have some very good players and so there's no telling yet how it will all play out.
In any event, despite the Foxsports.com report, it is too early as of yet to write the epitaph on Fox's coaching career at Carolina. There's no doubt, though, what it will say when that day does occur:
It was what it was.
Scott Fowler: 704-358-5140; sfowler@charlotteobserver.com; Twitter.com/scott_fowler.
