CHARLOTTE — There was a shimmering moment, between the initial desperation and eventual despair, when the Carolina Panthers looked like they’d finally figured out a way to win the same game they keep losing over and over again.
They had recovered from an abysmally slow start, finally found a way to get Christian McCaffrey the ball in places where he could put his skill to use, even managed to get a few stops on defense at critical times. They put the game on the foot of yet another stop-gap kicker — and got away with it.
Then the Panthers contrived to screw it up anyway, becoming the first team to lose an opener to the Cleveland Browns in almost a generation and finding, in the end, a way to lose the same game they keep losing over and over again.
And as much as people will point to a questionable roughing-the-passer penalty on Brian Burns that jump-started the Browns’ winning drive and set up their long-range field goal for a 26-24 win, much of the blame lies where it so often does, on a head coach who managed to both settle for a field goal and leave too much time on the clock at the end, a pair of decisions that came back to bite him on each cheek.
There’s a gym class somewhere missing Matt Rhule, whose team managed to look like 53 guys who were meeting for the first time in the first half only to be let down, once they figured things out, by their coach’s decision-making at the most critical moment in the second.
Just when McCaffrey got rolling, getting the Panthers down to the Browns’ 14-yard line, a fumbled snap — one of several by Baker Mayfield on the day in his Carolina debut, including one that McCaffrey picked up off the ground and ran with — cost the Panthers a down. Then, instead of even taking a shot at the end zone, they ran a pair of give-up runs inside and sent out Eddy Piniero, a late-camp replacement for the injured Zane Gonzalez, to kick a field goal with 67 seconds still on the clock.
Rhule and Mayfield said afterward that they were run-pass options that ended up runs, but either way, the failure to be more aggressive with the game on the line showed a lack of faith in an offense that finally found its groove — and would prove fatal.
The Browns had run the ball almost at will all day, but with no timeouts, they were stuck relying on Jacoby Brissett to take them down the field. The Panthers thought they had a better chance of stopping Brissett than trying to punch the ball in themselves. A 58-yard field goal later, they found themselves in the wrong.
Rhule even walked away with a timeout in his pocket after the Panthers got the ball back with 8 seconds to go, for all the world looking like a guy pulling a Full Costanza after finding out the Nebraska job was open. If the Panthers had any trophies, he’d be dragging them around the parking lot right now. That, at least, would have been a Rhule decision fans could get behind.
It was remarkable, to be sure, the Panthers had a chance to win this game at all. They were booed off the field in the second quarter, Mayfield bounced five passes off his former teammates and threw a sixth directly to one, and McCaffrey was merely a rumor until midway through the second half. Their best offensive play in the first quarter was a roughing-the-passer penalty on the Browns. CBS, at one point, caught owner David Tepper with the same expression on his face as every Panthers fan. They had no right to be in a game they ended up leading in the final two minutes.
But in it they were, with Mayfield finding his groove and zinging a 75-yard touchdown pass to Robbie Anderson, a one-play touchdown drive, and McCaffrey thriving in space and the defense getting stops. A restless, unhappy crowd finally had reason to cheer. If Burns had been able to keep away from Brissett’s helmet, the Browns’ last drive might have ended with a stop, too, and the game with it.
“It’s encouraging that we were able to turn it on,” Burns said. “It could have been a whole lot worse than what happened.”
So it’s all the more disappointing that the small-minded approach to the final two minutes left the Panthers in an all-too-familiar position when they were on the verge of starting fresh, riding Mayfield and a healthy McCaffrey to a very un-Panthers win, only to end up with a very ur-Panthers loss.
