Ron Rivera is gone, but the Carolina Panthers’ awful run defense still remains
As a football team, or as a fan of a football team, there are few things more discouraging than watching the opponent pound you straight up the middle for big gain after big gain and touchdown after touchdown.
If I’m playing armchair psychologist, this is the No. 1 reason why Carolina Panthers fans feel so bad right now each Sunday afternoon. Their team can’t stop the run, and that failure is humiliating — a slow, constant drip of pain that may well continue Sunday at Atlanta. It certainly helped lead to the Panthers firing head coach Ron Rivera this past week.
The Panthers have had significantly worse seasons than this one. I was (un)fortunate enough to witness them all.
They went 4-12 in 1998, 1-15 in 2001 and 2-14 in 2010. They got rid of their head coach afterward in each case.
These 2019 Panthers have lost four straight. Their overall record is a more pedestrian 5-7, but Carolina has never allowed its opponents to gallop into the end zone on running plays at such an extraordinary rate. Carolina’s defense has given up 22 rushing touchdowns this season — a league-worst mark and already a franchise record with four games still to play.
Run defense is football at its most elemental. To not play it well is to suffer death by a thousand cuts, and the Panthers are playing it as poorly as they ever have. It will be interesting to see if interim head coach Perry Fewell can help stop the bleeding.
Carolina gave up 232 rushing yards to San Francisco earlier this season — the ninth-worst performance in franchise history. Then the Panthers gave up 248 rushing yards (at a stunning 8.3 yards per carry) to a much worse Washington team Sunday. It was the fifth-worst rush defense performance in franchise history against a 2-9 Washington team that entered the game 28th in the NFL in rushing offense.
“On three of their big runs, we missed tackles,” Rivera said Monday, less than 24 hours before owner David Tepper fired him. “We missed tackles that probably kept them anywhere from a five- to a 10-yard gain at most. That’s disappointing. Especially as a defensive coach, you’d like to believe we’d be better tacklers.”
That’s the thing. The Panthers can’t tackle. They are undisciplined. They are inconsistent.
And sometimes — as with Adrian Peterson’s 12-yard jog into the end zone last Sunday for what turned out to be the game-winning touchdown — they don’t look like they’re trying.
The Panthers have stuffed teams trying to run the ball into the end zone for years, and Rivera’s best teams were especially effective at that. His previous eight Carolina teams averaged giving up a modest 11.1 rushing TDs per 16-game season, or roughly half of what this team has given up through 12 games.
In 2013, Carolina allowed a franchise-low four rushing touchdowns all year.
This year against San Francisco, the Panthers allowed five in a single game.
The obvious question is why? Fans like to place blame on Carolina’s utilization of a 3-4 scheme rather than Carolina’s old 4-3, although Rivera bristled at this idea on Monday a few hours before he was let go.
The loss of run-stopping defensive tackle Kawann Short to a partially torn rotator cuff in Week 2 is a factor. When asked early this season what the Panthers could do to replace the player everyone calls “KK,” fellow defensive tackle Gerald McCoy said: “That’s your mistake right there, to think you can replace a KK.”
Dontari Poe, all 346 pounds of him, is also out for the rest of the season with a torn quadriceps. The Panthers are no longer big enough or deep enough inside at defensive tackle. But it’s also true that the Panthers haven’t gotten as much production as usual this season out of inside linebacker Luke Kuechly, who used to constantly keep four-yard runs from morphing into 24-yarders.
Kuechly is still good, but he hasn’t been as extraordinary as the Panthers need him to be to make up for their other deficiencies. And you could go down the line pointing out problems with all the other Panther defenders, too.
The Panthers play at Atlanta Sunday, the same Falcons team that whipped Carolina 29-3 less than three weeks ago.
What to expect this time, with Fewell in charge?
Well, the coaches have been reshuffled, but the players haven’t. So, quite possibly, a runaway. Or a run away. And pain.
This story was originally published December 3, 2019 at 2:15 PM with the headline "Ron Rivera is gone, but the Carolina Panthers’ awful run defense still remains."
