NFL Week 3 Status Meeting: Fandom as Masochism

Mickey: Three weeks in, and you should know the shape of your team. For me, tonight, this is incredibly disturbing. The Carolina Panthers have limped into the 2009 season, standing as one of six teams sitting at 0-3. In the eight games the Carolina Panthers have played in 2009 — one playoff game, four preseason games, and three regular season games — we have yet to win one.

Being a fan of an underachieving team

I haven’t read any reports on tonight’s Monday Night Football game in Dallas, so there may be some bright, shiny statistic or storyline that I’m missing. I’m writing on pure emotion and gut feeling right now. And I feel stomach-punched. If you follow the Carolina Panthers, all you can read these days is that an incredible sense of urgency surrounds this team, that this week is incredibly important, it’s the week we turn it around. And the worst of it is that every loss can be explained away:

We picked a bad day to have a bad day.

It’s just preseason; once the real games start, we’ll correct the mistakes and get our feet under ourselves.

You can’t solely blame Jake; we just didn’t have the pass protection against a ferocious, blitzing Philadephia defense.

The Atlanta quarterback got the ball out quick and the pass rush and pass defense didn’t adjust well enough.

So what’s this week’s excuse? Without seeing John Fox’s post-game quotes or Jordan Gross’s or Steve Smith’s or Jake Delhomme’s or Jon Beason’s, I imagine it will be something along the lines of the offense not letting the defense off the field long enough in the second half or the miscommunications in the passing game.

Whatever it is, it doesn’t really matter. We’re 0-3, a mediocre team that very well could be terrible. We touted bringing back 20 of 22 starters from a team that went 12-5 last year. I bought that Kool-Aid and sold it hard. And now it just hurts.

But this is the National Football League. We’ve got a bye week coming up. We play a limping Redskins team that lost to the Lions at home. This could be the loss that the entire team rallies around. We’ve got to trust and pick each other up.

Shit, give me two weeks and I’ll be right back here, emotionally invested and believing those words.

Smokey: Round about the time that Cowboy cornerback pranced into the end zone on a pick six, my face went from overcast to thunderheads and my feet went from the living room to the kitchen. Several shots of tequila later Scattegories seemed like a far more enjoyable option for the evening. I pouted and grumbled, then made the best of the night. It was the healthiest thing I did the whole evening.

The Panthers remind me of a cartoon castaway: Whenever he plugs one hole, another pops up. This ship looks doomed and the scariest part is how blatant some of the problems are. Since January, Jake Delhomme has lost the ability to throw the deep ball, and Julius Peppers is not being the dominant force he was during the regular season last year. Being wide-eyed optimists, we talk ourselves up for each game, only to have the result seem inevitable.

Alas, we are guaranteed not to lose next week due our ‘bye’ status and hopefully John Fox can conjure up some mystical epoxy to right the ship and get the Panthers back on track. At this point, I feel like the middle-school definition of insanity: The Panthers keep doing the same things, expecting different results.

Oh, and it doesn’t look like Vinny’s gonna be able to save us again. (edit: Looks like Vinny’s still available. Miami signed Thiggers.)