Led by Foreman, a tough Carolina Panthers team is somehow in the playoff hunt at 3-7
This time no one took a helmet off, no one missed a game-winning kick and absolutely no one stayed dry.
The Carolina Panthers’ 25-15 upset win over the Atlanta Falcons on Thursday night in Charlotte continued their maddeningly inconsistent season and meant their faint playoff hopes, even at 3-7, haven’t died.
Like D’Onta Foreman climbing into the crowd — which the running back did, in a sort-of Lambeau Leap that was more of a Carolina Crawl and required a push from a teammate to complete — the Panthers rose again.
This was tough stuff in the most literal sense, as the Panthers acted like the bigger brother to a Falcons team that got both outplayed and out-physicaled. Carolina keeps trying to establish that sort of identity and on this night, one fit for a snorkel, it worked.
“As a defensive guy, I understand there’s nothing more demoralizing than having 200-something yards run on you,” said Panthers head coach Steve Wilks, who improved to 2-3 in his interim role. “It just kills your morale.”
No one in the NFC South has a winning record entering Sunday’s slate of games, and so the Panthers are still in last place but quite alive in an embarrassingly down division. They have beat up on the other patsies, going 3-1 against the NFC South and 0-6 against everyone else.
Foreman’s 31-carry, 130-yard, man-of-the-people night was the headliner, along with the defense. Foreman said his climb amid the fans was just “something I always wanted to do. I actually just wanted to get into the stands.” He also said the stunt knocked over at least one fan’s beer and sent it “bursting,” but no one seemed to mind.
The Panthers wore all black and debuted a black helmet for the first time in franchise history, and the look that was supposed to make the team look meaner somehow worked, too. Bring out the black helmets more than once a year if they’re going to have that sort of effect — Carolina had five sacks and harassed Falcons quarterback Marcus Mariota all night.
In the stands, everyone was wearing ponchos and standing, partly because the seats were too wet to sit in comfortably and partly because the home team was actually playing well.
The Panthers have been harder to figure out than calculus this season. They got blasted by Cincinnati on Sunday, trailing 35-0 after two quarters in what was the largest halftime deficit in franchise history. That day the Panthers looked to be a strong contender for the No. 1 draft pick of 2023 — which may still be the ultimate prize available for this season.
But they’ve also beaten a Tom Brady-led Tampa Bay team by 18 points. And then they played a game like Thursday’s, before a national audience (those who subscribe to Amazon Prime, anyway) that probably wasn’t thrilled with a matchup between two losing teams but had to have developed a grudging respect for a Panthers team that persevered through a steady, tropical storm-induced rain.
Foreman ran for 100-plus yards for the third time in four games as Carolina played conservatively in the rain, running the ball 47 times and only throwing it 16. Carolina’s rushing game hasn’t missed a beat since Christian McCaffrey got traded and in fact has improved in some respects. Before Foreman’s three 100-yard performances in a month, Carolina had had three individual 100-yard rushing games in their previous 46 games combined (two by McCaffrey and one by Chuba Hubbard).
Carolina had lost a heartbreaker at Atlanta only 11 days before, one in which a 62-yard touchdown pass from PJ Walker to DJ Moore in the final seconds got wasted due to Moore taking his helmet off and Eddy Piñeiro then missing the resulting 48-yard extra point and, later, a 32-yard overtime field goal indoors. Either of those kicks would have won the game.
This one wasn’t nearly as dramatic, as the Panthers went ahead early and stayed ahead the entire way. Atlanta, which had scored 37 points in its win against Carolina on Oct. 30, this time, only managed 15. Backup quarterback Baker Mayfield got so excited by all of it that, wearing only a baseball cap, he literally head-butted every helmeted offensive lineman coming off the field as the game ended.
Carolina out-toughed Atlanta by rushing for 232 yards. Foreman’s 12-yard, crowd-surfing TD made it 19-9, Carolina, late in the third quarter.
Piñeiro missed the extra point after that TD, but the Falcons’ Younghoe Koo missed two of them, and Piñeiro did hit 37-, 40-, 46- and 49-yard field goals, going 4-for-4 in difficult conditions. “I can’t say enough about Eddy,” said Wilks, who kept the kicker even after the two misses that helped lose the first Atlanta contest.
I thought the Panthers should have started Mayfield in this game, given how much better he played than Walker at the travesty in Cincinnati.
But Walker, the former fourth-stringer starting his fifth consecutive game, bounced back with a turnover-free performance. He moved the offense effectively albeit with modest passing stats (10 for 16, 108 yards, no TDs). Walker mainly handed the ball off and avoided mistakes, and that was enough. It was the fewest team passing yards in a win since 2009.
“Defense played their a--- off,” Walker said simply.
Carolina’s first touchdown came from Laviska Shenault, who took a swing pass that was technically a pitch-out because it went slightly backward and sped 41 yards for a second-quarter TD.
Shenault, as you may remember, went 67 yards for the deciding TD on his first Panthers catch (against New Orleans in September) — it would be wise to get it in his hands more often.
“They always like to make fun of me, talking about I’m 250 (pounds) and I’m slow,” Shenault laughed about his fellow wide receivers. “But I’m nowhere near 250, and nobody’s caught me yet.”
So about that still lingering playoff possibility:
The rest of the schedule for the Panthers?
They’re running out of NFC South games, which isn’t great — they only have two more in their final seven, against teams they’ve beaten in New Orleans and Tampa Bay in the final two weeks of the season. The hardest games they have left are road games against Baltimore (6-3) and Seattle (6-3). But more winnable games against Detroit (2-6), Pittsburgh (2-6) and Denver (3-5) are also coming up.
“One at a time,” Wilks said.
“We’re really on the path of trying to do the right thing,” said Bradley Bozeman, part of the offensive line that blocked for those 232 yards.
In another week, the Panthers might get blown out again. It’s hard to tell with these guys. But they are trying to establish an old-school mentality. And on Thursday night, in the rain, it happened.
This story was originally published November 11, 2022 at 5:45 AM.
