Week 6: Panthers 27, Seahawks 23
The details
The Seattle Seahawks had blown three fourth-quarter leads heading into the game against the Panthers.
Carolina made it four.
Tight end Greg Olsen caught a 26-yard touchdown pass from quarterback Cam Newton with 30 seconds to play, giving the Panthers a 27-23 victory over the two-time defending NFC champions.
The Panthers clawed back from a fourth-quarter deficit that at one time was 13 points to move to 5-0 on the season for only the second time. The first time? When the Panthers advanced to the Super Bowl in 2003.
“This was one of the bigger victories we’ve had since I’ve been here,’’ Panthers coach Ron Rivera said. “I think one of the things that really stood out and one of the things you really like about what happened was the resiliency.”
Luke Kuechly returned after four weeks in the concussion protocol and finished with 14 tackles.
They said it
“It’s not really about them. It’s about us. And if we play games like this with how we played the latter part, it’ll be hard to beat us. We’re not expecting anybody to give us anything. We don’t want them to give us anything. We want to take everything. We want to earn everything.” – Cam Newton
“I have one simple job every play. I try to do what’s asked of me. and when Cam needs me the most, I need to be there for him. That’s been my approach my entire career. I think he knows he can rely on me and I try to never let him down.” – Greg Olsen
“It’s very frustrating. Especially when, you know, we had them. We don’t (stink). We know who we are. We’re not finishing. We know we’re going to be in those pressure situations every game. We know that.” – Seahawks safety Earl Thomas
The weirdness
Panthers players and coaches were awakened before 6 a.m. on gameday and forced to evacuate their rooms at a downtown hotel after a fire alarm was activated on the team’s floors.
The alarm sounded around 5:40 a.m., and the team gathered in a meeting room on the first floor of the Grand Hyatt until an all-clear announcement was made around 6, according to a statement released by the team.
“Walking down 16 flights of stairs at (5:30) in the morning is tough,” Olsen said. “But we weren’t down there too long. We stood outside for a little bit, then went inside the lobby, collected as a group and shortly after we were able to go back upstairs.”
The Panthers said they would let the NFL investigate. A hotel employee said the hotel would have no further comment.
Rookie linebacker Shaq Thompson is convinced someone pulled the alarm to try to distract the team.
“I think it was an inside job; it had to be,” Thompson said. “There was just no way it would just hit our floors.”
Hot takes
Joseph Person: So much for the Panthers bringing Luke Kuechly back slowly.
The Pro Bowl middle linebacker hadn’t played in five weeks after his Week 1 head injury at Jacksonville introduced football fans throughout the Carolinas to the NFL’s concussion protocol.
But in the Panthers’ biggest win since 2013, Kuechly played every defensive snap and led all tacklers with 14 in a 27-23 victory against Seattle.
It should have been 15 tackles.
During the Seahawks’ last-gasp, final play, when a couple receivers tried to lateral their way down the field, Kuechly wrapped up Ricardo Lockette to seal the Panthers’ first win against Seattle in five tries over the past four seasons.
Kuechly wasn’t credited with a stop on the play; he’ll take the victory.
“It is a good win. It feels good, “ Kuechly said. “We haven’t been able to beat them in a couple years so I’m glad we were able to get over the hump.”
Tom Sorensen: All week, we wrote about the noise. In no NFL stadium do fans make as much noise as fans do at CenturyLink Field.
We anticipated the noise. Coaches did, players did and everybody else did, too. But the sound we didn’t anticipate was the one we heard after the Carolina Panthers scored the winning touchdown with 30 seconds remaining. We heard silence.
How, you might ask, do you hear silence? All afternoon 69,020 fans, a record CenturyLink crowd, had spent the afternoon yelling. When they weren’t yelling, they were screaming.
Suddenly, they had nothing to say. If you had been in CenturyLink Field, you would have heard the silence, too.
This story was originally published January 9, 2016 at 3:00 AM with the headline "Week 6: Panthers 27, Seahawks 23."