This one was quite a shocker for me because Carolina for perhaps the 2nd, maybe 3rd time this season, actually appeared to be a professional football team. They outclassed Arizona in just about every way you can imagine and while I don't think anyone was really taking the Cardinals seriously for the post-season, this loss to Carolina eliminated them from playoff contention. Carolina on the other hand has nothing to lose because they lost any hope of being in the playoffs 2 months ago.
src
The above image is that of Chuba Hubbard showboating into the endzone to end the game in sudden-death overtime.
Now we can look at the stats, particularly the early stats and think that the Panthers were just in beast mode and were unstoppable but make no mistake, they are still a very deeply flawed team and the turnaround score shows exactly that.
One would normally assume that when one side is really doing much better than the other, blowing up the score to 20-3 by the time the 2nd quarter rolls around, that this is going to be a safe victory for whoever ends up in the lead at that point. Well, this is Carolina we are talking about there so no, there is no safe lead that they can ever hold.
In just 6 minutes, Carolina gave up two touchdowns to bring the scores to nearly level.
After the halftime team talks Carolina came out of the locker rooms screaming again and got back to a 10-point lead with just 12 minutes left in the game. Safe right? Nah! This is the Panthers we are talking about here.
src
Sometimes I just watch the Carolina defense with a sense of bewilderment because I just don't understand what the hell they are doing. Some of the holes they leave in there you could drive a truck through, so a running back has zero difficulty fitting. It's very frustrating but at the same time I had picked Carolina to lose this game on a 5.5 point spread so I wasn't kind of hoping they WOULD screw it up. There's nothing really to be gained by the rest of the season other than getting some practice time in for Bryce Young anyway.
Speaking of Bryce Young, he actually looked very good in this game, running for rather huge yardage on plays not intended for him with one of them resulting in a TD. This is where what is inside the head is more important than how strong a person is and this is a good thing since Young is one of the smallest quarterbacks the NFL has had since the 50's.
src
I can see that my lack of faith as far as Carolina is concerned is not exclusive to me because even tough the game was tied in overtime, the odds-makers heavily favored Arizona to win the game despite the fact that their performance was pretty shite for most of the game. There is no other explanation for losing to a team as bad as the Panthers, especially when your playoff hopes were on the line at the same moment.
Next week we see the Panthers face off against Tampa Bay and this one could be interesting yet I will still keep to my plan of betting against Carolina on the spread. The Bucs are favored by 8 point meaning that in order for it to pay out for me, they will have to win by 9 or more.
The reason this could be interesting is that Bryce young and in particular Adam Thielen are looking good on passing in the last 4 games and Tampa is 30 out of 32 in passing yards against them for the season in the entire NFL. The bad news for Carolina is that they are dead last in the league as far as rushing yards against are concerned. This is expected to be a high-scoring game and could be worth watching even if you don't care who wins. The expected overall score by both teams is 50 at the moment and I expect that to change as we get closer to the weekend.