Panthers made another QB decision in wake of Sunday’s debacle, but it was the wrong one
In the latest chapter of “It’s Time To Rearrange the Deck Chairs on the Titanic Again,” the Carolina Panthers had another quarterback decision to make Monday.
And this time, they made the wrong choice.
Interim head coach Steve Wilks announced Monday that PJ Walker will start his fifth straight game for Carolina on Thursday against Atlanta, even though he had a 0.0 quarterback rating in Sunday’s 42-21 loss to Cincinnati. Baker Mayfield, who led the Panthers to three second-half TD drives in garbage time, will remain the backup.
This shows you above all what Wilks currently thinks of Mayfield as a QB who can win games for the Panthers:
Not much.
I now won’t be stunned if Mayfield remains a backup the rest of the year, replaced by Walker this week but then eventually by Sam Darnold, once the Panthers deem Darnold ready to play again.
Wilks’ confidence level in Mayfield is so spotty that he’s willing to continue with “The PJ Walker Experience,” which has now been in full throttle for four weeks, even though it turns out the expiration date on said experience was Halloween. It’s gone sour now, as Sunday’s embarrassing 42-21 loss to Cincinnati would attest.
To answer an obvious question: I don’t think Wilks is tanking.
Wilks needs to win for a lot of reasons, professionally and personally, and he’s doing it his way no matter what (abruptly firing two more defensive assistant coaches Monday being another example). Wilks thinks Walker gives Carolina the best chance at that on Thursday. And while Wilks knows Mayfield better than most, having also overlapped with him in Cleveland, that familiarity hasn’t helped Mayfield at all in terms of playing time.
Walker played well enough in a defense-keyed win against Tampa Bay and threw for 317 yards in a wild overtime loss at Atlanta that will forever he known as “The One Where DJ Moore Took His Helmet Off.” Walker did deserve to start again vs. the Bengals, even though Mayfield had gotten healthy by then from an ankle injury.
But on Sunday, Walker was behind 35-0 at halftime against Cincinnati and made everyone remember why, ideally, he is a backup.
Walker is simply too inconsistent. He was 3-for-10 for 9 yards passing and two interceptions in the first half for a 0.0 QB rating before getting pulled for Mayfield. By NFL law, there is no negative QB rating, so that’s literally the worst you can do.
The Panthers only had one first down in the first half, and it came by penalty. Cincinnati had 21. The entire half looked like a misprint, but it wasn’t.
While Walker is best served as a backup and spot starter, Mayfield is a legitimate starting NFL quarterback. Sometimes he’s not a good starter — Mayfield’s lousy play for the first five weeks of the season was a big part of Carolina’s 1-4 start and Matt Rhule’s subsequent firing.
But Mayfield played way better than Walker on Sunday, and I thought it was time to promote Mayfield and demote Walker for this Atlanta game Thursday night in Charlotte.
Now if Darnold was really ready, he may be the best option at this point. He’s a tempting choice, given Walker is 1-3 as a starter and Mayfield is 1-4. But even though Darnold was activated Monday, he’s not had any live snaps in a game all season and is coming off his own ankle injury. It sounds like he will be inactive Thursday.
Panthers have lost 14 of past 16
To get back to Walker:
You can hardly say with a straight face that a quarterback with a 0.0 QB rating over one half of play Sunday should start ahead of the guy you traded for, are paying millions to and who led you to three second-half TDs vs. the Bengals (albeit against backups playing what Mayfield admitted was “cautionary” defense).
The Panthers (2-7) are the messy room your teenager never cleans up. They have now lost 14 of their past 16 games dating back to last year. What happened Sunday was a lot bigger than the QB issue. But as is so often the case with the Panthers, bad QB play was the headliner.
Walker called a couple of his plays “boneheaded,” and he was dead right on that one. It’s happened before. Walker had two TDs and eight interceptions in his NFL career entering this season, and the Panthers originally had him figured as their fourth-team quarterback on a team that was going to carry three QBs on the active roster.
But after the first three guys all got hurt, it was Walker’s show, and he led some inspired play in the first few weeks of Wilks’ tenure.
On Sunday, though, it all came crashing down on Wilks (now 1-3 as interim coach) and the Panthers.
It’s hard in an NFL game to get down 35-0 at halftime because of the league’s beloved parity, but the Panthers somehow managed. They made Joe Mixon (five total TDs!) look like Barry Sanders and Joe Burrow look like Joe Montana. Their defense was atrocious. The offense may have been even worse.
Panthers must go to extremes
The good news is that by virtue of their 2-7 record, the Panthers would be drafting No. 2 overall in the 2023 NFL draft if the season ended today. The best scenario for the Panthers for the rest of 2022, in fact, is to be extreme in whatever they do.
The NFC South, due to its nastiness, is still winnable. Atlanta and Tampa Bay are both 4-5, and that leads the division. The No. 1 draft pick is also still winnable. Houston is barely ahead of the Panthers for “worst of the worst” right now at 1-6-1.
So if you’re a Panthers fan, you want one of these two things to happen — go on a run and win the South, or go on an enormous loss streak and get the No. 1 pick. Nothing in the middle. Carolina has eight games left. Ideally, the Panthers go 8-0 or 0-8. Or 7-1 and 1-7 would be OK.
Going somewhere in between those two extremes won’t really help anybody, although it’s quite likely that’s what will happen.
The Panthers’ players and coaches, of course, don’t think like fans. Winning is the only thing that helps them keep their well-paid jobs, or else most of them won’t be around in 2023 anyway to enjoy that new first-round quarterback Carolina will inevitably draft.
Mayfield — as bad as he was in the year’s first five games — gives Carolina the best chance to win on Thursday. He was 14-for-20 for 155 yards and two touchdowns Sunday and didn’t give the ball away.
It should be his turn again. But it’s not.
This story was originally published November 7, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
