Dallas, PIG, Odell and the bat: A rollicking Panthers season rolls into playoffs
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Super Men: The inside story of the 2015 Carolina Panthers
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For the Carolina Panthers’ first 20 seasons, the team practice on Thanksgiving Day would generally be moved forward a few hours and held in the morning, to allow players to be with their families and watch football in the afternoon like most of America.
But on Nov. 26, 2015, the Panthers weren’t watching the show on Thanksgiving Day. For the first time in franchise history, they were the show.
The road game against the Dallas Cowboys — America’s Team, and a Thanksgiving Day staple — had been eagerly anticipated by the Carolina players for much of the season. Well, most of them anyway.
Says Mike Tolbert, the team’s burly 250-pound fullback: “We didn’t want to play on Thanksgiving Day. I remember a lot of people complaining about that.”
Counters Thomas Davis, the Panthers’ Pro Bowl linebacker: “I was excited about playing on Thanksgiving Day. … Tolbert is a food guy. He doesn’t want to be away from food.”
In any case, the 10-0 Panthers were angry about the fact that the 3-7 Cowboys had been slightly favored by oddsmakers early in the week, owing largely to the return of Dallas’ star quarterback Tony Romo. They had been dreaming of a big Thanksgiving Day win to announce themselves — in some cases, quite literally.
Defensive backs coach Steve Wilks sidled up to safety Kurt Coleman during pregame warmups. “I had a dream last night,” Wilks said, according to Coleman. “When you get this interception, cut it back.”
Perplexed, Coleman nodded.
Only 59 seconds into the game, Coleman picked off Romo at the Cowboys 36. Coleman started to return the ball toward one sideline, then heard Wilks’ voice in his head. He cut back, found an opening and scored on a stunning pick-6. Carolina led, 7-0.
This was only the beginning of a nightmarish game for Romo, playing in front of 90,909 fans at home and a TV audience of 32.5 million (the contest turned out to be the highest-rated NFL game of the regular season in 2015). Trailing 13-3 in the second quarter, Romo was intercepted again, this time by linebacker Luke Kuechly.
Kuechly returned the ball 32 yards for a second defensive touchdown by the Panthers, but what his teammates still remember 10 years later is the way he slowed down just a bit toward the end of his TD when the only remaining possible tackler was Romo.
“Luke had a great sense of always being able to get one more shot on the quarterback,” says J.J. Jansen, the long snapper on the 2015 team and the only remaining player on that squad still on the Panthers’ roster today. “Maybe it wouldn’t work in 2025 but in 2015, he somehow punched the quarterback after scoring a touchdown in the end zone.”
Says center Ryan Kalil: “I’ll never forget watching it. … We’ll send it to each other on texts at least once a year.”
Agrees Kuechly: “We always say, ‘Get a piece of the quarterback. You gotta get a piece of ’em.’”
Kuechly intercepted Romo yet again, on the Cowboys’ very next offensive play. Romo was later knocked out of the game by Davis, who sacked him (the game ended up being Romo’s last as an NFL starter). Carolina demolished Dallas, 33-14.
As is customary, the team plane left for home soon after the contest and arrived in Charlotte around midnight. A number of players’ families had flown to Dallas to see the game, so they weren’t home yet, leaving a few Panthers at loose ends.
“Me and D.A. (backup quarterback Derek Anderson) and a couple of the guys, our families weren’t in town,” recalls tight end Greg Olsen. “And Cam’s like, ‘C’mon over. My aunt made Thanksgiving….’ So there we are at Cam’s apartment (in uptown Charlotte), having traditional Thanksgiving dinner at 1 in the morning.”
Thieves Avenue
The Dallas game had also shown the country that the Panthers weren’t only about offense. Carolina would wind up with an NFL-leading 24 interceptions in 2015. The team’s secondary also adopted a catchy nickname — “Thieves Avenue.” The nickname was first bestowed by defensive line coach Eric Washington, because the secondary was “just stealing stuff,” as Coleman says.
“Dude, I’m telling you,” cornerback Josh Norman says. “Thieves Avenue was rocking so hard!”
“We fully bought into it,” says safety Roman Harper. Fans sent the players signs that had some variation of the nickname, and they stuck several up by their lockers.
A mixed bag of players resided on Thieves Avenue — veterans like Harper and Peanut Tillman, young players like Tre Boston and Bene Benwikere and a special-teams specialist in Colin Jones who was also a backup safety.
Says Jones: “I was the only white guy in the room for several years. … They called me ‘Cream.’”
Odell, Josh and the bat
All of those players heard a speech from Wilks that season that they still remember a decade later.
On Dec. 19, 2015, Wilks addressed his players at the team hotel the night before a game against the New York Giants and their flashy wide receiver Odell Beckham.
Wilks was the rare Panthers employee who had grown up in Charlotte and would eventually become the Panthers’ interim head coach for 12 games in 2022. He had a strong relationship with his players, who liked to tease him about his uncanny resemblance to actor Denzel Washington.
As the players remember it, Wilks told them in his story about how his family had been proud of its yard in West Charlotte, but that the yard kept getting trampled by people using it as a shortcut to go somewhere else.
Coleman recalls that Wilks told the players that he proclaimed one day: “Nobody is going to cut through our yard anymore.” Wilks then produced a baseball bat and, in his telling, “made sure that nobody cut through this yard.”
To illustrate this story, Wilks brandished a black baseball bat. The point: Treat the football field’s 100 yards as your own backyard, and don’t let anybody use it as a shortcut to somewhere else.
The players loved this idea, although that origin story may be getting slightly mis-remembered. Benwikere was photographed the week prior, in a home win vs. Atlanta, holding a black bat aloft during pregame warmups.
In any case, that same bat made it onto the field in pregame warmups vs. the Giants — mostly held by Marcus Ball, who didn’t even need to warm up because he was just a practice-squad player.
Beckham saw the bat and didn’t like it, figuring the Panthers were trying to use it as an intimidation tactic against the Giants.
In response, some Giants also engaged in gamesmanship by purposely interrupting a Panthers drill by cutting through it. Beckham later moonwalked and also mockingly dabbed near Newton.
At one point, Norman grabbed the bat and began hitting his own head — “lockin’ the freak in,” as he puts it. “The buildup and hype was so cinematic, like, you can’t make it up,” Norman says.
That set the stage for Norman and Beckham to engage in their own private war. Norman held Beckham to zero catches in the first half, but New York’s wide receiver had six receptions for 76 yards and a TD in the second half. During a thrilling 38-35 Carolina victory, Each player was called for multiple personal-foul penalties as they repeatedly threw each other to the ground.
Afterward, in the locker room, Norman said to reporters of Beckham: “If you’re going to be Michael Jackson and go around and dance and play and do all the other stuff — not be a football player, and not train the way you’re supposed to train — it goes to show you. I hope I pulled back the mask. I hope I pulled back the face of what the dude really is.”
The NFL stepped in after that. Both players were fined, and Beckham’s behavior was so egregious that he was also suspended by the NFL for the Giants’ next game. The league also decreed that no team should be bringing bats or any other foreign objects onto the field.
Says Coleman, smiling: “The bat was not supposed to make it on any more trips. I can say now that the bat did make it on more trips.”
After the season, Kalil honored Wilks’ original bat story by commissioning decorative baseball bats to be made for the members of the secondary.
Many of them still have that keepsake.
The joys of PIG
The bat was just one example of a team that developed an unusually close camaraderie. Throughout the 2015 season, the Panthers worked and played football together. They also laughed a lot. Cornerback Peanut Tillman once purchased a lifelike fake alligator and hid it on the steps to team meetings, scaring various coaches with it and filming their reactions as the players roared.
On another day, veterans teased a young player by persuading him to bring Rivera, who is Hispanic, a burrito for lunch. Aware of the joke, Rivera played along.
“He comes back and hands me a burrito,” Rivera says of the rookie, whom he didn’t name. “And with a straight face, I said: ‘Really? You’re gonna give your Mexican head coach a burrito?’”
But by far the Panthers’ favorite locker room activity for 2015 and many other seasons was PIG, a variation on the old backyard-basketball HORSE game. A Nerf basketball and goal was taped up in the corner of the locker room, near the offensive linemen’s area. About half the team entered the tournament, paying a $20 entry fee. The offensive line rookies drew the bracket on a piece of cardboard from the equipment room.
In the early days, offensive linemen Jordan Gross and Kalil ran the game, seeding the top players and making the young offensive linemen draw up the brackets.
After Gross retired in 2013, the duties fell to Kalil to become the game’s commissioner.
“We ended up doing a March Madness-style bracket,” Kalil says — and the players took this fun seriously. Entire games were videotaped to obtain evidence in case of a rules dispute. Players would congregate 20-deep around the goal, razzing and cheering various shots.
When you lost, you had to sign the bracket, meaning the winner would receive both the money and a cardboard bracket signed by all of his teammates.
Other than a Super Bowl ring, Kuechly says: “The best thing that you can get if you’re a Carolina Panther is the PIG bracket.”
Kuechly never got a bracket and still regrets it. “Unfortunately, I was terrible,” he says.
Says Kalil: “It was funny. The guys never cared about the money. They just wanted the bracket. A lot of them framed it. Cam framed his when he won one.”
Thomas Davis won the PIG bracket in 2015, engaging in a lot of trash talk with Newton along the way. Offensive tackle Mike Remmers won the 2016 tournament.
Inside his home in Oregon, Remmers has the bracket framed and the net from the Nerf goal cut down and hung on the frame’s corner. “That’s how important it was to me,” Remmers says. (Knowing that fellow starting tackle Michael Oher didn’t like “The Blind Side” movie based on his life, Remmers made a bet that year with Oher that, if he beat him in a head-to-head game, Oher had to sign both his name and write “The Blind Side” beside it).
Says Olsen: “It was something stupid. It was small. It was fun. But to us, it was a big deal.”
‘People were proud’
Following the Giants game, the Panthers were an astounding 14-0. It was then that they sprung a rare leak, playing poorly in a 20-13 road loss to Atlanta two days after Christmas.
“I think we were actually a little relieved, maybe,” says Olsen of that defeat, which ended Carolina’s chances at a perfect season. “Obviously, I know the fans and everyone were talking about: ‘Let’s go undefeated’ and all that. Don’t get me wrong, we were trying to win all the games. But we just played terribly.”
In the regular-season finale, the Panthers rebounded by whipping Tampa Bay. Carolina ended its best regular season with a 15-1 record, boasting the No. 1 NFC playoff seed and a first-round bye.
By that time, the city of Charlotte was fully invested in the Panthers, and players felt the love all over the place.
Says running back Jonathan Stewart: “It was so fun, man. Everywhere you went. Go out to eat, ‘It’s on me. You want some wine?’ ‘I don’t drink wine, but yes! I would love some!’”
‘It was so loud’
The Panthers’ reward for their first-round playoff bye: Hosting their old nemesis, Seattle, in a divisional-round playoff game on Jan. 17, 2016.
And things got off to an electric start when — less than three minutes into the game — Stewart scored from 4 yards out, launching the home crowd into a frenzy and one little girl into viral-video stardom.
Amid his touchdown celebration, Stewart handed the game ball to pink-Carolina-Panthers-beanie-wearing 8-year-old Isabella Bottomley, who was sitting along the railing in Section 120 with her family.
The Alleghany County girl’s eyes and mouth opened wide as she bounced up and down in full view of Fox Sports’ cameras, and within hours the image of her touchdown celebration was being splashed across the country and beyond. (“I was just in shock that it even happened,” Isabella says, “but I didn’t really understand how much it had gotten around until I went to school and they were asking me about it.”)
The Bottomleys were still buzzing about that football in their seats when the Panthers struck again.
On Seattle’s second offensive play, Kuechly capitalized on Kawann Short’s immediate pressure, intercepted Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson’s first pass of the game and sprinted into the end zone for a surprise touchdown. It put the Panthers up 14-0, and the game wasn’t even four minutes old.
Fans who were there remember that Kuechly interception as one of the loudest moments in stadium history.
“We were in Section 525, jumping up and down,” says Josh Klein, a member of the Roaring Riot fan group. “I remember the thought going through my head, like, ‘It feels like the upper deck is gonna collapse,’ because it was so loud.”
After a near-perfect first half, Carolina led 31-0.
But Wilson brought Seattle nearly all the way back. The Seahawks scored 24 consecutive points in the second half. With 1:12 left in the game, Seattle lined up for an onside kick. If the Seahawks recovered, Carolina’s entire season was in danger.
Davis, the Panthers linebacker, was on Carolina’s team that defended against onside kicks, lined up in a position where a spinning onside kick would likely come right to him.
“The running joke on the team,” says Jansen, the Panthers’ long snapper, “was that Thomas Davis had the worst hands on the team, yet he was always on the hands team.”
The ball was bounced high in the air by Seattle kicker Steven Hauschka. Davis rose toward it, leaping on a leg that had endured three torn ACLs.
“Listen, there was no way I was gonna let that ball go at that moment,” Davis says. He came down with the football despite being submarined on the tackle — and Carolina had earned a spot in the NFC Championship game.
Driving on the sidewalk
Each home Sunday of the 2015 season, a handful of Panthers had their own tradition. They would ride to the game together from the team hotel (the Marriott SouthPark). Backup QB Derek Anderson would drive his SUV. Olsen rode shotgun. In the backseat were usually Kuechly, Jansen and Kalil.
Superstitious, the players insisted that they take the exact same route before each game. They listened to the same songs. And they parked in the same place — in the back of the stadium after looping around Mint Street — arriving about 3-4 hours before kickoff.
For the first home game of 2015, Olsen said: “There’s no barricades. No people. Nothing. We could have driven onto the field if we had wanted to.”
But as the Panthers kept winning, each Sunday the drive got harder to navigate.
By the final home game of the season, Mint Street was completely barricaded. The players were excited by this development. They liked when Anderson’s driving skills were challenged. Intent on taking the same route, Anderson hopped the curb with his SUV and started driving on the sidewalk, near the Panthers statues. He was stopped by policemen, who heard the story and waved them on.
By the NFC Championship game on Jan. 24, 2016? “It was bedlam,” Olsen says.
The players hatched another plan, deciding to use Kuechly’s innocent demeanor as a trump card. (Kuechly’s Captain America persona camouflaged a wide mischievous streak. Kuechly had dressed up as Newton for Halloween in 2015, raiding the quarterback’s locker for clothes and cleats and then sitting in Newton’s designated chair for the team meeting. Newton walked in and tried to hold a stone face, as if he wasn’t amused, but then burst out laughing).
The players found another cop and told him that it was Kuechly — when in reality, it was all of them — who was so superstitious that he had to drive on Mint Street in a certain direction before every game or Carolina would lose.
It worked. Barricades were removed. A makeshift police escort was formed. The players got there, inching through a crowd of black-and-blue-clad fans, a few of whom recognized them, pounding the fenders and screaming in delight.
“Magic,” Olsen says. “It just felt so big. And so special.”
A fan falls from the sky
Once the game began, the magic continued.
Carolina again sprinted to an enormous lead and this time never let up. Ted Ginn Jr. zigzagged 22 yards for a touchdown on a reverse. Kuechly once again had a pick-6 interception — and this time a Panthers fan standing in the end zone toppled over the railing and plopped down right in front of him.
Says Kuechly: “A guy falls from the sky and lands on the ground?! You expect a lot of things playing football. That’s not one of them.” Kuechly asked the fan if he was OK. The fans’ eyes showed conflicting emotions, says Kuechly.
“Shock — but also, like, ‘This is awesome!’”
Cracks Jansen: “Luke probably gave him his credit card to give him some food.”
“That guy had some good seats,” Kuechly says. “I feel like he’s probably doing all right. He might have needed a little bail money.”
The game was a lot like that scene, a giddy kaleidoscope of touchdowns and fun. Newton ran for two touchdowns and threw for two more in a 49-15 demolition.
There was only one asterisk. While combining with Kuechly on one tackle, Davis broke his forearm.
Davis spoke with the doctor shortly afterward. He was told there was a chance he could play in the Super Bowl — if he could tolerate the pain and if he had surgery at 6 a.m. the next day. “See you at 6 a.m.,” Davis said.
When Davis awoke from surgery in the hospital the next day, Kuechly was at his bedside.
Davis would end up playing the entire Super Bowl with a broken arm.
The injury to Davis was the latest for a defense that was getting very banged up. Says general manager Dave Gettleman: “The defense, at times, was held together with gum and duct tape.”
Still, with or without Davis, no one outside of Colorado thought the Denver Broncos would beat Carolina in the Super Bowl. The Panthers were the clear betting favorite as they headed to California, 17-1 and ready to win their first NFL championship.
Then, a lot of things happened. Most of them were bad — so bad that Rivera would eventually be the only member of the 2015 Panthers to get an NFC Championship ring inscribed with the numbers “17-1.”
“If you make me a ring that says 17-2, I’ll never wear it,” the coach says he told the ring company.
That’s because Rivera likes to think of the 2015 season at that peak, with the players on the Bank of America Stadium field celebrating after their dominant win over Arizona.
He does not like to think about what happened after that.
Part 4 | The Super Bowl
Questionable calls and a colossal Panther collapse, but — ultimately — gratitude.
This story was originally published July 16, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
