The Panthers’ embarrassing season ended with a thud, and change can’t come soon enough
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The records the Panthers set this season will stand for some time.
An eight-game losing streak, tying the NFL mark for the most rushing touchdowns allowed in a single season post-merger and the most points allowed in a half in franchise history.
Carolina’s 2019 season came to a fitting end Sunday. With their 42-10 loss to the Saints on a gloomy day in front of a barely half-full Bank of America Stadium, the Panthers finished the year 5-11 with two of the best players in franchise history, Luke Kuechly and Greg Olsen, standing on the sideline for all the wrong reasons.
After last season’s disappointment, seeing what could have been after a 6-2 start to the year swept away by a seven-game losing streak, 2019 was supposed to be different. Quarterback Cam Newton was supposed to be healthy and Ron Rivera was supposed to have a full season to prove why he deserved to remain the head coach in Carolina.
But that’s not how this season went down for the Panthers.
The first half of the season featured Newton’s injury and Kyle Allen’s subsequent four-game rise when it seemed like this season had promise. But things turned quickly. The Panthers won’t even go into the offseason with two full games of tape on rookie third-round quarterback Will Grier after he went out against the Saints early in the second quarter with a foot injury.
The subsequent losing streak, including a disastrous four games that prompted Rivera’s firing with four games remaining, will instead be what is remembered — the end of an almost nine-year era.
“There are four quarters in a season,” interim head coach Perry Fewell said. “We didn’t finish the second half of the season, the last eight games, very strong.”
There are far too many parallels between the 2018 and 2019 seasons. This year was almost a mirror image of last year, but then it turned worse. This was a team that was built to win now, structured around Newton. The Panthers signed multiple veteran defensive players, including Gerald McCoy and Bruce Irvin, who came to the team partly because of Rivera, and many of them will now likely sign contracts elsewhere in the offseason.
“This team has a great core, a great group of core players. You add myself to that core we’ve got a solid group,” McCoy said. “The thing about being married (is) you got another half … we’ll make the decision together … I love the organization.”
But there were the good things, too. And those shouldn’t be forgotten. It was even preached to players like Brian Burns to remember the positives along with everything that has occurred this year.
For this team, the brightest star was Christian McCaffrey, who became the third player in NFL history with 1,000 rushing yards and 1,000 receiving yards with a 17-yard reception from Allen on Sunday, joining Roger Craig and Marshall Faulk. It was achieved despite having passes thrown to him by three different quarterbacks and running behind an offensive line that struggled to stay healthy all season.
Allen, a player who wasn’t even sure if he was going to make the team this year, ended up starting 12 games. Some things are just out of anyone’s control.
Similar to the way 2010 is looked back upon, when the Panthers went 2-14 in John Fox’s last season in Carolina, this year will be used as a benchmark of how bad things got at the end of a period in team history, no matter what comes next.
Since David Tepper purchased the team, the Panthers are 12-20; change was necessary. When the game ended Sunday, as media raced down to the locker rooms to interview players after the game, Saints owner Gayle Benson and the team’s front office staff remained in the press box, watching the end of the Green Bay-Detroit game to see if they still had a chance at a first-round bye. That’s the goal for any team. To have something to watch for.
A new head coach and staff, a new assistant general manager and, potentially, a new quarterback will take the field the next time the Panthers play. This is a team with a lot of question marks and a lot of reshaping to be done. But what is known is that the 2019 season is now over. These Panthers are no more.
This story was originally published December 29, 2019 at 4:37 PM.
