Carolina Panthers lacked ‘opportunities’ for running game in second half

The Carolina Panthers appeared to have a good thing going with the running game by halftime of Sunday’s 20-13 loss to the Atlanta Falcons.

Then, in the second half, poof.

It was gone.

Carolina’s running backs had three carries for 5 yards in the second half of the loss. Mike Tolbert had one rush for 6 yards, Cameron Artis-Payne had one for 1 yard and Fozzy Whittaker took one handoff for a loss of 2 yards.

But coach Ron Rivera said it was more a matter of opportunities that led the Panthers away from running the ball. Carolina only had the ball for 8 minutes 38 seconds in the second half and ran 23 offensive plays.

The Falcons won time of possession, 35:38 to 24:22.

“We had limited number of plays,” said Rivera, whose offense ran 52 plays, the fewest of the season. “If you look across the board and look at the distribution of plays, it was pretty even between the three backs until Fozzy got hurt. And then again it comes down to how many opportunities you have as an offense (and) 52 plays is not enough.”

Also working against Carolina’s offense was the inability to sustain drives. Two crucial third down drops killed second-half drives for the Panthers.

‘You kind of get out of sync a little bit, in a game where both sides of the ball have a few amount of drives,” offensive coordinator Mike Shula said. “We ran the ball a lot in the first half and unfortunately we didn’t get the points to correlate with the yards rushing.”

Carolina entered the game as the most run-heavy team in the league with nearly half of their plays being runs. The Panthers did well on the ground with 20 rushes for 155 yards – an average of 7.8 yards per carry – so the second half numbers don’t seem to compute.

In total, the Panthers rushed the ball eight times in the second half for 46 yards.

Four of quarterback Cam Newton’s seven carries came in the second half, for 25 yards.

“We work on being balanced, but we also weigh that with some of the things that we think are going to be effective going into the game,” said Shula, who pointed out that Carolina’s last two drives were 2-minute situations. “So we just see how the game goes. However we get there, we’ve got to get more points than we did (Sunday).”

Whittaker suffered a high ankle sprain in the fourth quarter and won’t play this week. Rivera said Jonathan Stewart, who has missed two games with a foot sprain, may be available this week as the Panthers try to wrap up home-field advantage with a win against the Buccaneers.

If Stewart is unavailable, undrafted rookie Brandon Wegher will be active for the first time all season.

Rivera said he liked what Artis-Payne gave the team in his five carries for 49 yards, including one rush of 31 yards.

“I thought he ran well,” Rivera said. “I just wish we had more opportunities with the football to see what we could have done. I wish we could have had more opportunities in the first quarter and see how that all would have went.”

This story was originally published December 28, 2015 at 5:23 PM with the headline "Carolina Panthers lacked ‘opportunities’ for running game in second half."