Carolina Panthers: Learning from Deja Vu
The 2009 Carolina Panthers were surprised at home in a playoff matchup against Arizona. Anything to learn?
The Carolina Panthers take the field on Sunday to face the Arizona Cardinals in the NFC Championship game. It is a matchup that would have been thought inconceivable twenty years ago when the Panthers first became a franchise. However it is not the first time that the Panthers have hosted the Cardinals in the playoffs. The first time was 2009 and then there was last year.
The 2009 Cardinals have some important lessons for this year’s Panthers team. Those Cardinals had an underrated defense and a passing game with three productive receivers. They were captained by a quarterback making a late career comeback in his mid-late thirties and their head coach was a former Pittsburgh Steelers assistant.
Does any of that sound familiar? Here we have gone seven years and all we have done is replaced Adrian Wilson, Antrel Rolle, Larry Fitzgerald, Steve Breaston, Anquan Boldin, Kurt Warner, and Ken Whisenhunt with Patrick Peterson, Tyrann Mathieu, Fitzgerald, Michael Floyd, John Brown, Carson Palmer, and Bruce Arrians.
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One thing that the 2009 Cardinals had that the 2015 Cardinals could use was the running back combination of Edgerrin James and the young legs of Tim Hightower. This year the Cardinals have been losing running backs since the beginning of the year with the main man now being the young legs of David Johnson.
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However the biggest lesson from the 2009 playoff tilt with the Cardinals is not their similar team makeup or their personnel. It is how you cannot throw five interceptions in a game and hope to come back from it. That is exactly what Jake Delhomme did and exactly what Cam Newton cannot do. The Panthers had a 7-0 game and it turned into 20-7 pretty quick and the Panthers never came back.
So taking care of the ball will be at a premium on Sunday. Sure it would help if the Panthers take the ball away themselves, but they must avoid giving the Cardinals more offensive chances than they would get otherwise. That was one thing the Panthers did that prevented the Seahawks from coming back faster last week was not giving the ball back to them too quickly.
The Panthers play the Cardinals at 6:40 PM on Sunday.