‘They wasn’t buckled up’: Rico Dowdle wrecks former team with 239 total yards
After rushing for 206 yards a week ago in a Panthers win, backup Carolina running back Rico Dowdle knew the next team he was about to play was the very same one that let him walk away in free agency in March.
What should the Dallas Cowboys do to prepare for him?
“Buckle up!” Dowdle said.
Then Dowdle somehow trumped last week with a tremendous game against the Cowboys Sunday, setting a franchise record with 239 total yards from scrimmage in Carolina’s 30-27 shootout victory over Dallas.
What happened?
“They wasn’t buckled up,” Dowdle said.
The Panthers (3-3) moved to 3-0 at home this season at Bank of America Stadium for a lot of reasons. Among them: Bryce Young rebounding from an early interception and leading a game-winning drive that consumed the game’s final 6:07. Tetairoa McMillan scoring the first two touchdowns of his career. Coach Dave Canales going for it on a key fourth down late in the game on a play that ended up with Hunter Renfrow making a sliding first-down catch. Rookie kicker Ryan Fitzgerald nailing the game-winning, 33-yard field goal as time expired.
But the No. 1 reason was Dowdle, who provided 183 yards rushing, 56 yards receiving and the last word vs. his old team.
“It was a little personal,” Dowdle said afterward.
“Dowdle is the best player on the field,” former Panther Greg Olsen, calling the game for Fox Sports, said at one point during the telecast.
Dowdle correctly gave credit to the Panthers’ offensive line, which was down three offensive starters and still rolled through the Cowboys. Yes, Dallas came in with the No. 32 defense in the league by several measures (as well as the best offense), but you still have to make it happen. Dowdle did for the second game in a row, giving the Asheville native and former South Carolina star another big game that both Carolinas could celebrate.
Not only did Dowdle set the Panthers’ one-game “total yards from scrimmage” record — breaking Christian McCaffrey’s record — but he set the two-game total yardage record, too. Dowdle has 473 total yards over the past two games, obliterating another record previously held by McCaffrey.
Now is Dowdle actually another McCaffrey? He is not. Besides playing beautifully, he has benefited from two key factors: playing two poor defenses in a row (Miami and Dallas) and the absence of Chuba Hubbard, the Panthers’ first-string running back who is rehabilitating a calf injury and has missed the last two games entirely.
It should also be noted that Dowdle wasn’t perfect Sunday. In what could have been the game’s biggest goof, he yelled at teammate Xavier Legette (another former Gamecock) to “pitch it, pitch it!” when Legette was about to be tackled after a short gain on a pass play. Legette tried the ill-advised lateral. The attempt not only lost yardage, but Dowdle then fumbled while trying to run. Legette had to leap on the ball to keep the play at the humiliating level and not catastrophic.
“That’s on me,” Dowdle told the coaches, admitting he called for the lateral.
Said Canales, plaintively, to both players: “Guys, don’t make stuff up.”
In both of these last two games, Dowdle has gotten so much work that he has cramped up in the fourth quarter. In each case, he has gotten very familiar with the healing properties of pickle juice. Dowdle had a career-high 30 carries Sunday as well as a 36-yard touchdown reception. By the end, third-string running back Trevor Etienne was the one with a couple of big-time carries.
Etienne, reminded by Young, also had the foresight to not allow Dallas to “let” him score on his final carry. The Cowboys (2-3-1), in a last-ditch effort to get the ball back with the score tied at 27-all and Carolina well within field goal range, basically backed out of the way to let Etienne go. Instead, Etienne obeyed the “first down, get down” mantra, falling down at the Dallas 12 to set up Fitzgerald’s game-winning field goal and put Carolina at the .500 mark — a rarity this late in the season for a team that has missed the playoffs for seven years in a row.
Etienne laughed, however, that he wasn’t going to do that next time because he still wants to score his first NFL touchdown. “I told Coach, ‘Next time, y’all are gonna have to come tackle me,” he said.
Afterward, much of the talk was about Dowdle. Canales said he ran with “violence.” Said Young, who had three touchdown passes himself and led his second straight game-winning drive: “It was personal (to Dowdle), and we knew that. We wanted to have his back. That’s our brother. And if it’s important to him and it’s personal to him, it’s personal to us.”
The Panthers’ biggest question now will be what to do when Hubbard returns from his calf injury, which may happen this week. Even prior to the injury, Hubbard hasn’t run with the same explosiveness as he did in 2024. Having two good backs is a good problem to have, certainly, but you also can’t give Dowdle only 10 touches next week after you see what he can do with 34, as he had Sunday. The NFL is a “what have you done for me lately” world, and Dowdle has done an awful lot.
As for next week, the Panthers play at the New York Jets (0-6). Carolina will undoubtedly be favored to win a third straight game and surpass the .500 mark.
If they do so, Dowdle will be a part of it. He has been the biggest surprise story of this young season.
Said Dallas quarterback Dak Prescott about Dowdle, his former teammate: “He told us to buckle up, and he went and had a helluva game.... He got the last laugh.”
This story was originally published October 12, 2025 at 7:16 PM.
