Gantt: Panthers mid-day report for 08/10/05

I think we beat ourselves, in various ways. There were winnable games in that 8 game losing streak of 02...we were a championship team but couldn't buy a win around a month from the playoffs of 03.

 

The Rams still have a plethora of cornerbacks on the roster, with DeJuan Groce, Kevin Garrett, Terry Fair, Corey Ivy and Ron Bartell competing to back up Butler and Fisher.

:94poopban

 

maybe he can play dime.

 

Maybe if we put both Manning and him together we'll have the dime.

(get it? 2 nickels to make a dime? )

 

yep thats true. Its learning how to win. How to prepare for each and every opponent. Learning how to prepare for the 49ers, to go in a beat them down, is different than learning how to be mentally prepare to play against the heavily favored New England Patriots in the Super Bowl. Sure there will be times when things just dont go our way, that happens. The Titans game of '03 was brutal, but it was one of those games where everything did go against us. that happens. But the Cardinals game that year, where it came down to the end, or close to the end. We need to learn how to put teams like that away early. Its just the next step.

 

Agreed. I think part of that is being a little less stubborn about playing "our ball" and more concerned with how to beat "their ball". In early 03, you'd think we'd not changed our gameplan once.

 

Its not his tackling thats the issue, its his brains.

 

to start with, wouldn't you say that beating the holy crap outa the tuna after the cowgirls beat us up during the season and then dominating the eagles after they had put a whupping on us at home was taking "the next step?" wouldn't you say that say that us coming back from 1-7 and winning 6 of the last eight despite all the injuries was taking "the next step?" huh?

i've been watching this game for umpteen, umm make that umty, years and i've never been fortunate to have rooted for any team that won every game that on paper it looked like they shoulda won and didn't have to fight tooth and nail to the bitter end with some not so great team or two. not saying it's never ever happened in the nfl but i gotta imagine it a rarity. (as an example, in the same year NE beat us in the SB they lost to Washington and Buffalo both of which sucked bigtime that year, squeaked by the Texans in OT and barely beat the Browns). i gotta think those are such unbelievably unrealistic expectations that if you don't guard against that kind of stupidity you will allow yourself to be sucked into that dark place by a scarred mind where you too will lose the ability distinguish when something good, even great and brilliant, has just occurred on the field. you too will be booing when ya should be cheering.

for the life of me i can't understand why there continues to be so much negativism from supposed fans all the time when so much good has happened to the team over the last 3 years. hell, even most of the media, many of whom don't even know where in the heck Charlotte is, are expounding the character and coaching on this team. i swear we could win every game during the season and the SB too and all by a 100 points a game and the boobird king would still find a reason to be pissed.

to say that we were a championship team in 2003 and thus should have won all our games is a grand distortion of reality. true enough we won a championship but we weren't a great team during most of the season and for a good portion of we weren't even a good team. we had gone from 1-15 to 7-9 and at the beginning of 2003 few picked us for the playoffs. most fans were saying they'd be happy with 7 wins at the beginning of that year. the dark side knows that well as it continued to be a cynic and preached doomsday throughtout most of that season and then happily remained strangely silent as the team befuddled his prediction that it would fall apart because it wasn't using/developing it's passing game. it even advised us all after the team had won it first few games that the team was making a huge mistake early in 2003 by trying to win games at the sake of not developing the passing game ... which was being QB'd by a guy that had never been a starter (and over whom he picked Weinke during the preseason) and a group of receivers that were stuggling with their hands, completing routes and their temper, not to saying anything of learning their new QB and him learning them. (and not to even mention having the likes of howard and cousin on the corners, turnstile todd at LT, a mistake prone FS, and Greg Never-Did-Me-Any-Favors at LB.) despite the improvements in the passing game that were obvious during the playoffs, the boobird still sniped and now is back in prime form trying to build up again these ignorant and unrealistic expectations that every gameplan is going to work and if it doesn't that every adjustment will work and it will happen immediately. it is after all only the nfl and these things are easy especially against the likes of NE ... just ask that supposed offensive juggernaut the Colts of 2003 with the likes of Manning and Harrison. shouldn't the Panthers have gameplanned to have come out passing the whole game after have the opportunity to see NE kick their passing game in the ass in the playoffs?

 

yes. Beating the Eagles (which you declined to note) and Cowboys in the playoffs was incredible, considering we couldn't beat them before. At worst, it shows we can adjust after a full game.

Supposed?

For one, nothing's perfect. I mean, if they were, you wouldn't piss and moan about Trgo, right? Or is it okay to say that, considering how you're not exactly rainbows and sunshines about things you don't like and yet none of us are "actual" fans for having opinions?

Could you honestly be any more dramatic? "Unbelievably unrealistic expectations" in this case, by the topic finleye and I were discussing, was letdowns of multiple games in a row (3 games, 6 games, 8 games - major portions of seasons in which we showed we were good football teams and yet couldn't buy a win for months at a time).

So it's unbelievably unrealistic to hope that a team can come back from a loss with a win, having learned from the win? Is that really what you're taking such a dramatic stand on? That people don't have a right to wish we could have less than a 6 game letdown?

 

ESPN just noted that we were 0-3 in games that were decided by 3 points or less. Two of those were with playoffs on the line, I've noted.
Just to reinforce that we should learn to handle that situation (one of these, btw, was Atlanta, where we decided not to try to win at the end of the game despite Delhomme's abilities in 2-minute, and featured a disastrous draw play in that as well; the other was New Orleans, in which they took away, for a time, what we did best at the time, and we struggled to find other ways to move the ball). The frustrating part is that we'd obviously won all of those opportunities in 03.