MVN - Most Valuable Network

Panthers Take on Buccs For 1st Place

The NFC South lead will be on the line tommorow afternoon when the Panthers (4-1) travel to Tampa Bay (3-2) to take on thier most heated rivals. The Cats have won 5 straight in Tampa.

These two teams do not like each other, and I would not be surprised if this one ended up with a final score of 13-10.

Buccaneer head coach John Gruden praised the Panther defense. Saying that they were “nasty and all over the place”. That is a true compliment coming from a coach who has built his reputation on playing great defense.

Offensively for Tampa Bay, here is where it gets interesting……………last week in Denver, Tampa Bay’s offense only managed to score 13 points (One TD) against the 29th ranked defense in the league. Keep in mind, this is the same defense that allowed the Kansas City Chiefs to look like Super Bowl contenders. You could say that this happened because Brian Griese went down to an injury………….but is Jeff Garcia that much of a dropoff from Brian Griese? I don’t think so.

Gruden then mentioned that Denver’s defensive success came from them dropping 8 in coverage, and rushing 3 lineman. Since when did Tampa Bay becoming a passing team? With 2 good backs like Ernest Graham and Warrick Dunn in the backfield, you almost want Denver to rush 3. If you only get 13 points off of a 3 man rush most of the day, then there is a problem on that offense somewhere. And I’m sure the Panther coaches will be looking into that.

The Panthers own the 2nd best defense in the NFC, right behind the Giants and they are ready for it all. There is no need to go into how I feel about this defense, because you already know and we have seen what they can do. 

Defensively for Tampa Bay, the Panthers are going to have thier hands full. Denver also only managed to score 1 TD despite having the 2nd best offense in the NFL. The Buccs contained Jay Cutler and shut down rising star Eddie Royal and Brandon Marshall. They have a veteran defense who has been there, done it, and seen it all. It’s hard to exploit these guys. They are fast, take good angles to the ball and are just as nasty as the Panthers. Even though the stats say otherwise, I see the Buccs defense as being almost a mirror image of the Panthers defense.

To win, the Panthers must win this game on defense and play field position.  If you allow Tampa’s offense to get rolling, the defense will step up and play just as hard. This is the way they have been playing since John Gruden arrived on the scene. When watching the Buccs, there’s not much difference from the good team I saw last year. But when watching the Panthers, there’s more difference than one can count. And for the first time since 2003, I can actually say that the Panthers offense is physical enough to match up well with the Buccs defense. But it will depend on who wants it more.

Buckle your chin straps, there will be heads getting knocked off in this one, and I can’t wait.

And thats the bottom line

WR DJ Hackett Injured Yesterday……..Again

Check out this post that I wrote here on September 5, 2008:

With Steve Smith out for the first 2 weeks and Ryne Robinson injured, the team was happy to see Hackett return to the field. He could see some action Sunday at San Diego.

I don’t know if you could be too excited though. This guy has been in the league only 4 years and he’s had a hip injury in ‘04, a knee injury in ‘05, an ankle injury in ‘07, and a toe injury in ‘08. And the toe injury came just by him taking off in his stance!

The good news is that there’s no more body parts below his toe that he could injure being that he’s injured everything from the waist down. The bad news is that we’ve been through this before with Dan Morgan, and I don’t know how much more tolerance the Panthers are willing to have with injury prone players.

………..Now I wrote this one month ago. And here we are one month later and he gets injured on the opening kickoff? This is a talented guy that Carolina picked up in the offseason at a great price. In 2006 he had career high 45 catches for 610 yards and 4 TD’s. This is the Hackett the Panthers wanted. But we are seeing Dan Morgan reincarnated all over again. Thank goodness we signed Mushin Muhammed during the offseason, otherwise we’d be in bad shape! Outside of Steve Smith we’d have Dwayne Jarrett and return man Mark Jones who has only been with the team a month!

Officials have not released a timeline on his return, but if he’s out, WR Dwayne Jarrett will start suiting up for games again. A guy who I think deserves a shot at getting some playing time. It will be interesting to see how he performs.

Panthers Embarrass Chiefs 34-0

………..There was nothing to it. I wrote a short post this morning because there was no need to even break this game down.

The Panthers did everything right today. 400+ yards total offense and holding Larry Johnson to 2 yards. The Cats did not play to the level of thier opponent, and they cleaned up mistakes. The Panthers were averaging almost 10 penalties per game coming in. Today they only had 3. A major improvement.

The Panthers ran, they passed, they ran, they passed some more, they called timeout………………..then they went back and ran it down thier throats.  Carolina played a complete game and won all three phases in dominating fashion. Everybody contributed to this thing today, even Josh McKown with his effective handoffs to the Running Backs in 4th! Kansas City’s defense played decent on a few plays where they stuffed the runner. They also recovered a fumble and intercepted a ball in the red zone. But thier offense didn’t help them out at all. Just as soon as they could recover the ball, the sooner the offense gave it right back.

Defensively, Carolina didn’t even let Kansas City sniff the end zone until the final seconds of the 4th. They repeatedly stuffed everything the Chiefs threw in thier direction. Nothing worked. The ‘D’ has now gone 2 weeks without giving up a TD, and only 2 TD’s in the last 4 weeks. That is incredible. It doesn’t matter if you want to run left, right, or up the middle, this defense is there time and time again. It is a work of art. You can not draw it up any better. This game reminded me of when I play Madden on XBOX, and I put it on the ‘ROOKIE’ level, just so I can get a quick victory.

Damon Huard was horrendous today. I heard that Carolina actually gave him the game ball. On one of his 2 interceptions, there was nobody within even 15 yards of the defender. I don’t know what Kansas City is going to do about this situation, but he is far from the answer. If your future Brodie Croyle is constantly injured, wouldn’t it be wise to bring in a guy with experience during the offseason?  Teams are running through them like wet toilet paper on the ground, and with thier two young corners, teams are passsing on them as well. There are alot of problems going on over there.

Last year Carolina was usually on the bad end of a blowout. So as a fan, it was good to watch a game where you knew the team was going to win…………………… and it was just a matter of by how much. On the first possession of the game I knew it was going to get ugly. The Panthers smelled blood and they attacked all day long. If I were a Chiefs fan, I could not have beared to watch this one.

The Panthers will not have it this easy next week as they travel down to Tampa Bay to take on a hungry Buccanneer team that is just coming off of a loss to Denver. The Panthers are currently in first place in the NFC South, and they are going to have beat Tampa Bay in order to maintain that lead. And if you don’t like to see players getting thier heads knocked off, you might not want to watch this one. These two teams have a history together, and I’m seeing this one as an ugly low scoring game. But I’ll get into that more later on this week. For now I’ll go back and watch more of the Panthers/Chiefs game. (The games are much more fun to watch when you already know the outcome).

And Panther fans, you can go to sleep with a smile on your face tonight. We have arrived back to dominance.

And thats the bottom line

Panthers Will Win Today if They Execute

The Panthers will take the field against the Kansas City Chiefs in about 2 hours. The Panthers are better, thats no suprise. If they play thier game they will be 4-1 by about 4:15 this afternoon.

In an interview with ‘The Panthers Huddle’ television show, Jake Delhomme said that the team has yet to play a complete football game and they still need to keep working to get better on that. Interesting………………….Was it not me who said the exact same thing?

Back to the topic, the defense has seen some of the best backs this league has to offer this year, and that line doesn’t end with Larry Johnson. I have said that I would put this defense up against anybody, and the Chiefs do not worry me even though they had a suprising victory against Denver. People don’t realize that Denver doesn’t play defense! Which is a major reason why Johnson ran for almost 200 yards last week. That will not happen this week. I said before that the best thing about this Panthers defense is that can take you on “mano y mano”.

The Panthers just simply need to play thier game, execute, and at least show us some kind of improvement with these false starts. It has just gotten out of hand now. If they simply do this, they win. There is nothing else to it.

And thats the bottom line