World’s Best Preview: Inside the Panthers
Our weekly look inside the opponent leads off with the Carolina Panthers’ big-play defense and includes notes on running back Christian McCaffrey, quarterback Kyle Allen and a top linebacker tandem.
Big play defense: After being shut down last week by the Chargers, the door is open for a rebound against a statistically soft Carolina defense. The Panthers are 21st in points allowed (25.5), 31st in rushing yards allowed per carry (5.06) and 32nd in the red zone (69.2 percent touchdowns allowed). Where the Panthers have thrived is the creation of game-turning plays.
With a league-leading 34 sacks and a third-ranked 19 takeaways, Carolina has created 53 big plays, for lack of a better term. Only New England (57) has more. The Panthers are third in interception percentage (4.00) and second in sack percentage (11.22). If you ever wanted to know the link between pressure and interceptions, the top four teams in interception percentage also are the top four teams in sack percentage.
Starting with the pressure, it comes from everywhere. Mario Addison leads the team with 6.5 sacks. A ninth-year pro, he’s quietly built himself into one of the NFL’s better pass rushers with 36 sacks since the start of the 2016 season. His 52 career sacks rank third among all active undrafted free agents.
For Carolina, it’s strength in numbers. It has a league-high nine players with at least two sacks. For sake of comparison, the Packers only have two players with two-plus sacks. Brian Burns, the team’s first-round pick, has 4.5 sacks. Veteran Bruce Irvin has 3.5. Defensive linemen Vernon Butler and Dontari Poe, linebacker Shaq Thompson and safety Eric Reid have added 3.0 sacks apiece. Gerald McCoy, a former Pro Bowl defensive lineman with Tampa Bay, has 2.5 sacks. Rookie Christian Miller has contributed 2.0.
“There’s a lot of different guys they send at you and they are relentless,” Packers coach Matt LaFleur said. “They are hard-charging. They do a great job of getting on edges. They just send so many different people. It’s just a platoon of different guys coming at you on each and every snap. We’re going to have our work cut out for us.”
While a lot of defenders have sacks, the Panthers aren’t a blitz-heavy team, quarterback Aaron Rodgers said. For instance, in last week’s win against Tennessee, the Panthers blitzed on only seven of 46 dropbacks against Ryan Tannehill.
“They feel good about getting after you with that four-man pressure,” Rodgers said.
Pressure turns into interceptions. Carolina is second in the league with 12 interceptions and fifth with 42 passes defensed. Cornerbacks Donte Jackson and James Bradberry lead the way with three picks apiece.
Last week, the Packers struggled to move the ball against a Chargers defense that was content to rush four and drop seven into coverage. It could be the same sort of game this week. That makes the matchup between Carolina’s ball-hawking secondary vs. Rodgers – who has the NFL’s lowest career interception percentage – one of the keys to the game.
“When you know the pass rush is getting home, you can play a little more aggressive because you know the ball’s got to come out at certain times,” Rodgers said. “The other thing is, a lot of their coverages, they have vision to the football. So, they are playing through the quarterback and reading eyes and reading the top of the drop. When you have a pass rush and then you have eyes to the quarterback, you’re going to be in position to have your hands on the football a lot more often.”
Looking off the secondary is the key to combating that, Rodgers said. And that, in turn, can create some big plays for a Packers team that had just one play of longer than 17 yards last week.
“I think they do a good job of reading the quarterback and the wide receivers,” offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett said. “They obviously study the different route patterns that they’re going to be facing and I think they get good jumps on it, which can be a good thing for them and could potentially be a bad thing for them.”
McMVP: Carolina’s offense revolves around the historic exploits of running back Christian McCaffrey.
According to STATS, McCaffrey is the first player since former Chiefs running back Priest Holmes in 2002 with 1,200-plus scrimmage yards and 13-plus touchdowns through eight games, and he’s the first since Hall of Famer Jim Brown to record 150-plus scrimmage yards and a touchdown in six of the first eight games.
On the ground, McCaffrey has 881 rushing yards, a 5.3-yard average and 10 touchdowns. His 110.1 rushing yards per game is No. 1 in the league. Through the air, he’s got 42 receptions for 363 yards (8.6 average) and three touchdowns after setting a running backs record with 107 catches last year. Added together, he’s got 1,244 yards from scrimmage. That’s the most in the NFL; Minnesota’s Dalvin Cook has 1,232 yards in nine games. His 155.5 scrimmage yards per game is the eighth-most in NFL history through eight games.
Preparing for him is almost impossible on the practice field.
“If he could mimic him, he would probably be playing with the varsity,” defensive coordinator Mike Pettine said of finding someone to take scout-team snaps. “You do the best you can, but our guys understand with all the film they absorb just knowing how special a back he is. Leading the league in yards per gain, yards per carry, that’s impressive.”
McCaffrey isn’t particularly slippery, ranking in the middle of the pack in ProFootballFocus.com’s elusive rating and yards after contact, but he’s a home run threat. Not only does he lead the NFL with six rushes of 20-plus yards, but he’s got four touchdown runs of 20-plus yards. Other than Arizona’s Chase Edmonds, who also has four long touchdowns, no other player has more than one. Some of that effectiveness is because he is so good in the passing game that he forces defenses to use an extra defensive back. That means a lighter box to attack.
“When he sees a crack, he puts his foot in the ground and takes it,” Pettine said. “There’s not a lot of dancing. That’s one of the reasons he’s hit some of the big runs he’s hit, because he’s decisive. The offensive line has done a good job, and he doesn’t need a lot of space. When it’s there, he takes it.”
Without quarterback Cam Newton and without a dynamic receiver corps, McCaffrey has had to shoulder the offensive load by playing 92.5 percent of the offensive snaps. He’s first among running backs with 63.4 snaps per game. Jacksonville’s Leonard Fournette (62.4 snaps per game) is the only other running back playing 60 snaps per game. Fournette, of course, is 6-foot and 228 pounds. McCaffrey, by contrast, is 5-foot-11 and 205 pounds.
Nonetheless, Rivera believes he’s got the right formula to make sure McCaffrey is at his best in December and, perhaps, beyond.
“I think as long as we’re smart with the workload, how many plays he plays I think is not that big a deal,” Rivera said in a conference call. “The thing we have to do is we have to be smart and make sure that we’re not exposing him to certain things at certain times. One thing we’re looking at is limiting certain things. We’ll continue to go with that. Guys, it’s football. It is a tough game. You’ve got to be smart. Hopefully we can continue to be smart and fortunate with him.”
The linebackers: Luke Kuechly commands a lot of attention, and for good reason. Since entering the NFL in 2012, he leads the NFL with 1,026 tackles. More than that, he has 18 interceptions – a resounding seven more than any other linebacker.
“His knowledge of the game is unbelievable,” Hackett said. “You can’t really fool this guy. He’s going to study everything, from calls to stances to splits. He’ll look all the way out to the wide receivers. He’ll do everything he can to get a tip. I think his edge is, is not only he has a great physical ability, but his intelligence is just unbelievable. You see him checking into things, checking out of things. He’s truly the quarterback of the defense and plays like a top-notch quarterback.”
That should make quite a cat-and-mouse game at the line of scrimmage between Kuechly and Rodgers.
“He can do it all. Does remind you of Brian (Urlacher) and the way that he can be so versatile against the run and against the pass,” Rodgers said.
The other linebacker is no slouch. While Kuechly leads the team with 78 tackles and is second with seven passes defensed and third with two interceptions, Thompson is next with 69 while adding three sacks.
“They’ll sometimes walk him out on the slot and have him doing some stuff down the field on receivers because he’s so athletic and fast,” Rodgers said.
Added running back Aaron Jones: “He’s a physical linebacker. He gets after it. He flies around whether it be the run and the pass game. You’ll see him come down and fit up and he’ll realize it’s a pass and run out of there and still get enough depth. Him and Kuechly, one thing they both have is speed. I think that’s something that helps their game.”
At the University of Washington, Thompson won the Paul Hornung Award in 2014 as the nation’s most versatile player with his 80 tackles on defense, 456 rushing yards on offense and six total touchdowns. He was Carolina’s first-round pick in 2015 as that new-age defender who’s big enough to play linebacker but fast enough to handle coverage.
“Shaq has been outstanding, he really has,” Rivera said. “And I think he’s kind of the unsung hero on our defense the last few years, going all the way back to ‘15, the Super Bowl. I think he really came in and has established himself as a football player for us and now with Thomas having gone to (the Chargers), we see a lot more Shaq and he’s done a great job.”
No Cam, no problem: The Panthers started the season 0-2. Adding injury to insult, former MVP quarterback Cam Newton was placed on injured reserve with a foot injury, throwing the fate of the season into Kyle Allen.
Allen is about as unheralded as they come. After playing extensively at Texas A&M as a freshman in 2014 and sophomore in 2015, he found himself stuck behind Kyler Murray and transferred to Houston in search of greener pastures. Instead, after sitting out the 2016 season, he found himself benched after three games in 2017. With a limited resume of 580 pass attempts, 37 touchdowns, 18 interceptions and 61.7 percent accuracy, Allen bet on himself and went to the NFL.
Allen went undrafted in 2018 and was released at the end of camp. He spent one week on the Panthers’ practice squad before being released again. Remarkably, the player who has kept the Panthers in the playoff race spent seven weeks out of the NFL altogether before rejoining the team’s practice squad in late October. Two months later, in the season finale, Allen made his first NFL start and beat New Orleans.
Coupled with winning his first four starts this season, Allen became the first quarterback in NFL history to go 5-0 with zero interceptions in his first five starts.
Rivera swears he’s not surprised.
“It’s one of those things that sometimes you watch a guy and you see a guy do things and you say, ‘Wow, this guy’s got a chance,’” Rivera said.
“I had a chance to watch him when we brought him in during our rookie camp, our minicamps, our OTAs and then through training camp. The one thing that happened when we got to training camp is he wasn’t getting a lot of reps but yet he was retaining a lot. So, when he did get in, he didn’t make mistakes like a lot of rookies do. He’s kind of proven our faith in him correct. We’ve been very fortunate.”
Rivera is quick to point out Allen hasn’t been doing it alone, and he’s right. He’s 28th in completion percentage (60.7) and 22nd in passer rating (87.8). Because the Panthers run the ball well, they throw it deep. They don’t do it well, though. On passes thrown 20-plus yards downfield, he is 5-of-25 passing with zero touchdowns, one interception and a 39.3 rating.
“They’ve done a good job understanding that they have a young quarterback and protecting him that way,” Pettine said. “He’s put some real good tape out there. Our players, this isn’t a guy that, hey, we’ve got to pump up to him. He’s made some big-time throws, has some escapability and has made some big play as a result. He throws a nice deep ball. This team takes more shots than any other team that we’ve played, so we’ve got to make sure that we’re on point with staying on top of the verticals.”
