‘I like North Carolina’: Seattle’s Russell Wilson torments Panthers in Charlotte again
There is a moat that protects the NFL’s best teams and keeps out everyone else.
Inside the moat, you’ve got your castle, your feasts and your pet dragons that you can take out on joy rides.
Outside the moat, every other NFL team is scrabbling around, trying to track down a wild boar before starvation sets in.
Seattle, which edged Carolina 30-24 on Sunday, is inside the moat and luxuriating in the castle today — mostly because it has Russell Wilson.
Carolina is far outside the castle, looking for a drawbridge. The difference in quarterbacks was the difference in Sunday’s game and in the trajectory of these two franchises.
Wilson is everything you want in an NFL quarterback — charismatic, strong-armed, elusive and clutch. He had a perfect passer rating in the first half Sunday and moved his career record to 5-1 in Charlotte against the Panthers, whom he has beaten in the fourth quarter with numbing regularity.
“I like North Carolina,” Wilson said with a smile after a 20-for-26 performance in which he threw for 286 yards, two touchdowns and no interceptions. “I played here for so many years at N.C. State. It was a blessing to play at N.C. State and be a part of the Wolfpack. ... I told Coach (Pete) Carroll this week: ‘The ball spins good for me in North Carolina.’ It always has.”
The Panthers trotted out Kyle Allen at QB again on Sunday. He threw three interceptions, almost threw a fourth and then led two impressive fourth-quarter touchdown drives. It was — to put it kindly — uneven.
Wilson, on the other hand, was uniformly excellent. Seattle (11-3) scored touchdowns on each of its first three drives. And, at the end, Wilson ran out the game’s last three minutes after Carolina (5-9) made the bad decision not to onside kick down by six points.
“We want to have the football in our hands,” Wilson said, describing how happy he was that Carolina decided to rely on its defense instead of trying for the onside kick.
Two first downs later, and that was that.
Every one of those six Seattle-Carolina games in Charlotte over the past eight years has been a one-score game. Wilson has won all of them but one -- he’s 5-0 in the regular season -- compiling a 104.0 quarterback rating. An 83.3 winning percentage on the road? That’s impressive.
“He loves being back in Carolina,” Carroll said. “He really has played well here. We’ve won a lot of games against these guys, and he’s always been in the middle of it.”
The only exception: the one year when Cam Newton was at his most elite. Carolina edged Seattle, 31-24, in Bank of America Stadium during the 2015 playoffs — although Wilson almost brought his team all the way back from a 31-0 deficit even then.
Newton might one day reach that elite, Wilson-esque level again. Or maybe he won’t — it depends a lot on whether he can stay healthy, and the quarterback who had foot surgery Monday hasn’t been able to for the past two years.
Allen won’t be able to get to that level and sustain it, though.
We’ve seen enough of a sample size now to see what Allen is. He’s way better than Jimmy Clausen or Chris Weinke ever was, but he maxes out at somewhere a little south of Steve Beuerlein. Allen is nowhere near Newton in his prime — although Newton hasn’t been in his prime for a long time.
Allen can throw the ball pretty well. He can win you a few games -- he’s now 6-7 as a starter in his entire Panthers career. Maybe the best comparison is Derek Anderson, the longtime backup to Newton. Allen can also make some terrible decisions, which is part of the reason he has accounted for 22 turnovers this year (15 interceptions, seven lost fumbles) against 19 touchdowns. When Allen makes mistakes, they often come in bunches.
“I put us in some bad positions today,” Allen said afterward. “Didn’t play the way I needed to play to help us win the game. Stuff at the end (the two late TD drives) doesn’t really matter because I just put us in the bad positions.”
Wilson? He did about 50 good things and one bad one. He fumbled the ball on a strip-sack in the second quarter and lost it. It would have been a huge play for Carolina, but Gerald McCoy had jumped offside.
Two plays later, Wilson threw another TD pass. The Seahawks celebrated in their castle, and the Panthers looked longingly at that moat again, wondering how they are ever going to get across.
This story was originally published December 15, 2019 at 7:06 PM.
