Carolina’s offensive line leads charge against J.J. Watt, Texans

On one side of the line was Mike Remmers, an undrafted offensive tackle for the Carolina Panthers who is playing for his sixth team in four years.

On the other side was J.J. Watt, the Houston Texans’ megastar defensive lineman who became the second-fastest player in NFL history to reach 60 career sacks.

Watt’s final stat line had five tackles, two passes defensed and one sack. But Remmers got the win.

“He’s going to get his plays, that’s for sure,” Remmers said. “The most important stat is we got the W.”

To say Remmers bottled up Watt single-handedly for the game would be unfair and inaccurate. The Panthers mixed up their protections against Watt—sometimes they rolled coverage to his side, other times they had a running back chip him out of the backfield, and most of the time the help came in the form of right guard Trai Turner or a tight end helping block Watt.

Complicating matters for the Panthers were the other playmakers who could, and did, rush the passer. If Watt got stonewalled by Remmers, there was Jadeveon Clowney on the other side of the line who could be rushing Cam Newton.

Panthers coach Ron Rivera spent a chunk of last week talking about how Carolina couldn’t focus solely on Watt, the two-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year, in the game plan.

“That is a tremendous defensive front and I think that football team has some good football players across the board,” Rivera said. “For us to contain them, to do a nice job to give our quarterback time … I mean heck, we rushed for over 170 yards and threw for over 170 yards. That’s a pretty successful day against a very good defense.”

There wasn’t much success to start the day for Carolina’s offense, though. The Panthers had 41 yards on 16 first-quarter plays and zero third-down conversions as Newton missed on six of his first 10 pass attempts.

The inconsistency early enabled the Texans to throw different defensive looks at the offensive line and left the unit scrambling.

That began to shift at the start of the second quarter. The Panthers got into their no-huddle offense and got the Texans on their heels. Carolina went 74 yards in five plays on a drive that was capped by a 25-yard Ted Ginn Jr. touchdown catch.

Carolina’s up-tempo offense meant the Texans had to stay in their base defense and keep most of their players on the field, helping the line block players who could be gassed on a hot day.

“Sometimes if you can see (the pressure) early you’ll try to get one (rusher) on two (linemen) just to give the quarterback just a little more time to get it off,” center Ryan Kalil said. “And in those cases someone is not covered so if you can hold off just a little bit longer, the quarterback can get it out and those are big plays you can hit.

“The hope is if you can hit enough of those they’ll stop bringing pressure. That’s the key early on in the game is you want to stop that stuff early and prevent them from calling it later.”

Watt’s lone sack came on a first-down play when he dropped Newton for a loss of 4 yards. Watt got up and mocked Newton’s first-down signal by pointing the opposite way.

Newton was sacked just twice but had a number of passes batted at the line for a second consecutive week, something the Panthers’ offensive line must do a better job of in the coming weeks.

Holding up against the Texans’ defensive line is something teams can take pride in. But Turner isn’t hanging his hat on one solid performance from Week 2.

“If you do it week-in and week-out, yeah. But not one week,” Turner said. “No. Anybody can do it one week.”

This story was originally published September 20, 2015 at 8:34 PM with the headline "Carolina’s offensive line leads charge against J.J. Watt, Texans."