Are the Panthers snakebit or just not quite good enough? We’ll see against the Giants
It’s tempting to re-watch the end of the Panthers’ 26-24 loss to the Browns and chalk it up to misfortune.
There was the questionable roughing the passer call on defensive end Brian Burns on Cleveland’s first play of its final drive. There was the “fake-spike-then-spike” that could’ve pushed the Browns out of field goal range with mere seconds to go if assigned a penalty. And then there was the 58-yard field goal from rookie Cade York to seal it with eight seconds left — a fitting end to a perfect storm.
The result delivered Carolina its eighth straight loss — the longest losing streak in the NFL — and it laminated the latest luckless chapter for a team that, for the last three seasons, has suffered from a special teams unit not being up-to-snuff when it counts, from a star running back being stifled by injury, from a hope hangover resulting from an inspiring quarterback departing on someone else’s terms and more.
Does all this make the Panthers down on their luck? Probably.
But are they snakebit?
That might be answered in Week 2.
Carolina travels to take on the Giants, another team that has endured considerably bad luck the past three years, at 1 p.m. on Sunday. As of Monday at noon, the Panthers were 2.5-point underdogs by Vegas Insider and other sports books.
The Panthers-Giants matchup is a compelling one because the two franchises share a doomed symmetry: Both have a lot of their money and future tied up in their running backs in a throw-first league, and neither has made the playoffs since the best quarterbacks in their histories were at the helm. (That’s Eli Manning for the Giants, who retired in 2019, and Cam Newton for the Panthers, whose successful first-stint with the Panthers ended in 2020.)
While the Panthers’ misfortune has appeared to follow them into 2022, the Giants (22-59 the last five full seasons) have appeared to shed theirs.
New York fought back from a 13-0 halftime deficit and defeated the Tennessee Titans on Sunday. The team somehow held running back Derrick Henry to 82 yards on 21 carries and benefited from a 47-yard missed field goal as time expired to see its first season-opening win since 2016. In tandem, the Giants saw a triumphant re-emergence of running back Saquon Barkley, who ran for 164 yards and a touchdown, and a solid performance by quarterback Daniel Jones, who went 17-for-21 for 188 yards and two touchdowns and one interception.
There’s more to it, too, beyond the Giants getting lucky in Week 1 and the Panthers not doing so: One team went “for the win.” The other seemed content playing not to lose.
In the Giants’ season-opener, quarterback Daniel Jones found Chris Myarick on a one-yard touchdown pass with 1:06 to play to make the score 20-19, the Giants an extra point away from tying the game up. Instead, though, the team went for two, and a Jones-to-Barkley shovel pass proved successful to make it 21-20 (the game’s final score).
“Go for the win, we’re going to be aggressive,” Giants head coach Brian Daboll said of the choice to try for the two-point conversion, per reports. “If it didn’t work, I could live with it. I thought that was the right decision.”
Meanwhile, the Panthers treated a similar late-game scenario a bit differently. With the game in its reach late in the fourth quarter, the team muffed a snap and ran twice into the line to no real avail, and that set up a go-ahead 34-yard field goal to make the score 24-23 with over a minute left on the clock.
“We did not want to give the the ball back to them,” Panthers head coach Matt Rhule said on Sunday of the decisions to run the ball on the final two plays of the Panthers’ last meaningful offensive possession. “The first snap, obviously, putting the ball on the ground, might have changed us a little bit. We wanted to put the ball in McCaffrey’s hands and take the game out of Garrett’s hands.
“The third one was the same RPO that we hit DJ (Moore) on, so our hope was that if they brought pressure, we could hit DJ one on one and win the game with a touchdown. We went with the play that got us there.”
There’s no denying that the end of Sunday’s game at Bank of America Stadium featured a perfect cocktail of bad luck for Carolina — of questionable flags and no-calls late, of a rookie kicker rising up to a moment that has so-often turned NFL kickers into NFL greats.
There’s no denying, too, that fortune eventually turns.
The Giants proved that Week 1. What will the Panthers prove Week 2?
This story was originally published September 13, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
