Anyone that knows me knows I’m a big Carolina Panthers fan. I watch every game, go to a few and more than tolerate the “rebuilding years” that are too often the norm. That said, what I am not is a John Fox or Jake Delhomme fan and I’m quickly getting on the anti-Steve Smith bandwagon. I mean seriously, Fox is so conservative nowadays a high school assistant could predict the Panther play calling and Delhomme (while a good competent quarterback) is not a great quarterback and probably never will be.
The game against the Bills yesterday proves why this team shouldn’t have won the division last year and why they’ve been getting trounced ever since. 435 total yards to the Bills measly 167 yards and in a game that lasted for 60 minutes the Panthers controlled the ball for 34:40 of that hour. Here’s my major malfunction with this team. The cats put up a respectable 116 rushing yards and what should have been an ass grinding 309 yards passing. Yet they only managed to score a measly 9 points. WTF!!!! When you have two of the best running backs in the league, who consistently have a nice per carry average, why on earth would you waste time throwing the ball? Certainly not because of Steve Smith, who yeah is a great receiver but not a Jerry Rice type receiver. He’s dropped a lot of balls this year and in this game while snagging 6 passes for 99 yards he failed to put any points on the board…. again! For a team that touts itself as a running team, there ain’t a whole lot of running going on.
UGH!!! And then there’s Jake. What can you say, he can’t move around in the pocket and tries too hard to force the ball to Smith which usually results in more like the 3 INT’s he had this week. Whatever, dude… somebody send Fox a memo that he’s got two other QB’s on the roster, geez, let one of them play for a change, they can’t do any worse.
