Week 5: Chicago Bears @ Carolina Panthers

My first rule of thumb when watching the Carolina Panthers on TV is to not make it personal. So many times I get extremely angry, frustrated, sad, mad, happy, depressed, excited, joyful, aggravated, or annoyed, usually all within a matter of minutes. This can not be good on my physical or mental health. So I start each game with a small pep talk to myself. This is a game, just a game, life will go on, and the outcome will not determine my mood for the rest of the day or week.

This week however was more difficult than others; I was unable to shrug this one off. You see I was born and raised in central Illinois, so the majority of my childhood friends, college buddies, and family are Chicago Bear faithful. So this week, out of all weeks, the game was personal. Sadly, I must report, it did not go as well as I would have hoped.

There were a few factors that were playing in the minds of the media, fans, and players prior to game. Chicago would be playing without their franchise QB, Jay Cutler and in his place starting Todd Collins. Todd Collins a veteran in the league had not started a game in three seasons. Good news for Carolina. Chicago was coming off a despicable loss on the road in New York against the Giants, the morale was down. Yet another piece of good news for Carolina. Lastly, Carolina was coming off a very strong performance against a very good offensive Saints team. It is beginning to look like a perfect storm for the Panthers and like we could get a win just before our bye week.

So what went wrong? Lets take a look at the stats below:

CHICAGO BEARS:

- 219 yards rushed

- alright Chicago didn't really do anything else that impressive, we were just that bad

CAROLINA PANTHERS:

- J.Clausen was 9/22 for 61 yards 0 TD/1 INT

- M.Moore was 5/10 for 35 yards 0 TD/2 INT

- 4 Fumbles

- 3/18 Third Down Efficiency

- 7 penalties

- 0 points converted from turnovers

- 0% Red Zone Efficiency

So if you go back one post, you can see how great our team had improved from weeks 1 & 2 to week 3. And from the stats above you can see how quickly we fell to THE worst performance of the season.

The game started off with Carolina winning the coin toss, we elected to defend first. Chicago opened up with a great punt return putting them in great field position. They scored on the drive and were up by a touchdown with less than two minutes run off the clock. Carolina received the ball and started out on our own 39 yard line. We had an impressive drive down the field with two breakout runs by DeAngelo Williams and Jonathan Stewart. We were able to drive down to the Chicago 6 yard line, but were unable to put the ball in the enzone. We kicked a field goal and were down by four. At this point in the game, it seems as if the game will be a back and forth battle and a good defensive stop will determine the game. But this is all about to change.

We kick off to the Chicago -5 yard line (middle of enzone) and they run it out, Manning made it to the Chicago 32 yard line before getting brought down. The first play of the drive was a run for Matt Forte who took off for a 68 yard touchdown. Carolina is now down 14-3 with half of the first quarter still to go. I am still not sure how we did not prepare for such plays. Given that their starting quarterback was going to be out, we knew they would be relying on the run heavily throughout the game.

Carolina receives the ball back and on our first play, Jimmy Clausen fumbles the ball, we recover, but lose one yard on the play. On the third play of the drive, Jimmy Clausen throws an interception, to give Chicago the ball on the Carolina 27 yard line. (now in all fairness to Jimmy Clausen on this particular turnover, it was a fluke accident, it was tipped up and it happens to fall right into the hands of none other than Julius Peppers, however in the NFL a turnover is a turnover). But as you can tell by the drive above, just where this game is headed.

At this point, the game has taken a turn for the worse. Thankfully our defense had shown up to play and was able to hold them to only a field goal. This finally brings us to the end of the first quarter. Yes, you read right, the first quarter. The remainder of the game was a very un-thrilling match of Carolina's defense making big plays, to give the ball back to our offense, who in turn handed the ball back over to the Bears on a silver platter.

There are a couple of key points I wanted to discuss about this game more in particular. A couple of play calls on offense and the decision to pull Jimmy Clausen with less than four minutes to play are a couple of areas I am still scratching my head over.

We are at 4:23 left in the 2nd quarter, down 17-3. We have started with the ball on the Chicago 42 yard line. We need to only move the ball down the field 10-15 yards (at the very least) to give John Kasay a chance for a field goal. This is worse case scenario. Best case, we move the ball down the field and get a TD. This is the best field position we have had all day (by at least 20 yards). The first play called on the drive is a wild cat formation with Armanit Edwards, he throws to Gettis (rookie WR) and we lose six yards on the play. We are now at the Chicago 48. The next play called? Another wildcat formation to Armanti Edwards, because it worked so well the play before. This time instead of throwing he ran up the middle for seven yards. We are still out of field goal range and we are now at third down. Needless to say, the best field position we had, the chance to score some points before the half, and we blew it because we were trying to get tricky.

Jeff Davidson, our team is made up of a number of rookie players who are still adjusting to the systems in place. Our team has not been able to do well executing the every down plays, why would you call a these plays when we had great field position? Especially when we have D.Williams and J.Stewart who are obviously ready to go, given they had rushed for almost a fifty yards on a previous drive. There is no reason for this. We could have easily gone into halftime 17-6, if not 17-10.

The last point I wanted to discuss in this game was the decision to pull Jimmy Clausen in the fourth quarter with less than four minutes to play (3:36 to be exact). Clausen was having a rough day, not performing to the caliber he had in New Orleans the week prior. However, he will not learn to continue to fight if each time we yank him to put in Matt Moore. We must stay consistent and give him all the time in order to learn, develop, and gain the experience needed to be our future. A great article was put on the Carolina website, titled "Growing Pains", (I plan on posting in regards to this topic and article at a future date) but it states this point perfectly. Each rookie quarterback is going to lose a number of games before they win, it is inevitable. So why is the coaching staff not reading this and following this philosophy, we must learn not to handle him as if he is a porcelain doll, let him play and get the experience, win or lose.

It was a very painful loss to deal with, but I have two weeks to recover (thankfully), but as always GO PANTHERS!