Happy Half Hour.

Hello friends, and welcome to yet another happy half hour.

That's still the name of the show, I promise.

It's that happiness is relative.

And you know what, it's still the Happy half Hour, and it's still brought to you by our friends at Deep Eddy.

And I heard all the people in the Deep Eddy Sweet yesterday had them a big old time.

That was a good time, even though I think everything about yesterday's game was exciting and fun and an enjoyable experience, except for the game itself.

It was a perfect day up until the third play of the game, or third play of the Saints first drive.

It just didn't go the way you wanted it to.

The Carolina Panthers are now five and five on the season after a seventeen seven loss to the New Orleans Saints.

This one was not great from the standpoint of they got taken out of the mode of football they want to play almost instantly.

I mean, they went down the field first drive, scored a touchdown Rico safely, no pumps, he was safely within the bounds of the celebration rules, and then nothing else went right the rest of the day.

Yeah, don't think that's hyperbole.

I think well, so, like I said, the third play of the Saints drive, everything kind of went downhill from there.

The first play was a great or they handed it off Alvin Kamara was kind of wrapped up real quick.

Second play, Tyler Shuck was sacked by Trevin Wallace, and it's like, Wow, this is really gonna this game is gonna go exactly how the Panthers wanted to.

Yep, the third play, it looked like they were about to sack him again.

He did a little shoulder move, got out of it, found a wide open Juwan Johnson Denfield was like fifty two yards or something like that.

And that's kind of how the rest of the day went.

And it went like that, and it went like that.

He It's so interesting because and you know, Nick Gorton kind of like warned us about this last week.

He's like people keep saying rookie quarterback, rookie quarterback.

He's twenty six years old.

Man's two years older than Bryce Young.

Yeah, and so he's got a lot of experience.

It wasn't at the NFL level, but he's not kind of he's not coming in Green either, And I think you finally saw that start to come together this was his second start in the NFL.

On paper, you go, rookie quarterback, second start in the NFL.

Just traded away one of your just traded away one of your top receivers, your left tackle or left guard.

I'm sorry, Like this should be a pretty standard approach for how to get to him on defense, and it's the approach they took for the entire game pretty much.

Blitz blitz, blitz, pressure, pressure, pressure that leaves you susceptible on the back end, and the Saints took advantage of it with eight explosive plays.

Dave Canal has told us today, right.

And there were things happening, and you know, we've talked about this previously this year.

I remember talking about the Bills game and I said, you know, this enough an outlier, you can kind of build a fence around it and call it a zoo.

And just to understand that it's not like everything else, this one was moving down that road because this game so many of the components, I mean, to your point, Nick Gordon's getting pressure.

There was pressure throughout the day.

But the thing you don't expect is j Horn falling down.

Yeah, and you don't happened twice one of your best players to be on the ground looking for help for officials that wasn't gonna come, and then watching Chris o'lay run the other direction.

I mean, that's that's the kind of thing that Carolina Panthers don't expect.

And there was a good bit of this in the post game.

Afterward you talked to JAC.

I mean, j C basically raised his hand and said, put it on me.

Yeah he did.

He said, he told the defense, like you all did what you needed to do.

I messed up.

This one's on me.

Respect to JC for taking on that responsibility and ownership.

It's not all on him, no, But to his point, there were two the Saints scored two touchdowns.

Both of them were on explicit plays that JAC felt at fault for and then it's hard to argue with him.

One of them you can argue should have been OPI.

But jac he also said that, you know, George Lee has shown them in recent weeks that at the NFL level, they're calling that less and less and that he's got to he can't expect the call to come.

He's gonna have to play through it, and that you know, it's sure, it's a little difficult sometimes because if he plays through it too much, he might get a flag for DPI.

But you still got to play through it.

And then with the Jwan Johnson touchdown as well, I think he slipped on that play as well, Right, he slipped, yeah, and Johnson was and Johnson was was open for that thirty yarder.

He said he told the defense afterwards, like, I'm one of the leaders, I'm one of the highest paid guys on this team, that that's not acceptable, that that performance for me was not acceptable.

And he was like, y'all keep doing what you're doing.

I promised to be better.

And he had a little bit of like oomp to him, a little fire when he goes, he goes, I can't wait to play next Sunday.

Yeah, Like I'm gonna make it up to him.

It's it's interesting watching the reaction actions to this one, and it's fascinating.

This led into the next thing in my notes this immaculately prepared show, Rundown, I did hear.

One of the things I wanted to bring up early in this show was the Bryce Young we saw after that game was unlike the Bryce Young we've seen after any game this season or any game in a long time.

Because Bryce was coming in hot.

He walked up onto that stage in the team meeting room, got behind the lecter and started answering questions almost before they were asked.

Yeah, and he was ready to do the act of contrition, raise his hand, say bad ball, bad read on me one hundred percent.

I mean, questions weren't even all the way out before he started asking them because he was so eager to do that.

Bryce was hot game.

We don't see angry Bryce often, but we got angry Bryce after.

That game, and there was You started to see it during the game a little because he got hit on a play and they ended up getting the guy for rough in the passer and so it was it was a first down, but he like he was, he got a mad But then I think shortly after that might have been the interception.

I'm trying to remember the link how it went.

The bottom line is, yeah, they saw and teammates talked about it after the game.

When you see Bryce like that, it's kind of that proof of ownership.

I mean that he is used to situations where things go well, going back to his days at Alabama, and there is some frustration when a game's going like that when they weren't getting the ball downfield.

I mean, the Saints basically dared them to throw the ball and they weren't able to make it happen.

So Bryce was frustrated it wasn't working out in the passing game and after the game, I mean, he was foremost among the people making sure everybody knew, along with the JC Horns and Derek Brown's of the world, this ain't okay.

Yeah, And I do think it's interesting as well that this is now two weeks in a row that we've sat here and said, oh, I haven't seen that sort of Bryce in a press conference before, because last week that might have been some of the most confident and a little like cocky but undeserved that we've seen Bryce this week complete one eighty.

But to your point, we've never You don't really see Bryce mad that often, and he was mad.

Now the question is what does he do with it?

Well, does it snowball or does he use that as fuel to kind of go out there and then take it out on the falcons.

One of the things people close to me get frustrated with is my constant desire to push everything to the middle and to keep everything even and be the same guy every day.

And even my wife, I love her, she was not thrilled with that game and wanted explanations for why.

And you know, my short answer last night was sometimes you get to bar, sometimes the bar gets you.

And that was an unsatisfying answer for my wife and for many people.

I mean, you want people to care, you want people to be upset.

It beats the alternative.

But in talking about the big swing from last week at Green Bay was over here now this week, you're over here three weeks ago at four and four.

If I said you know they're going to split these next two games, right, you would take it and you're going to be five and five at the end of those.

Everybody'd have been like, that makes sense, Yeah, happen, and nobody understood.

Nobody appreciated the path it was going to take to get to that same five and five.

So expectations messed with people.

I understand that, but I do think it's instructive to see that kind of reaction, to see how much anger, and it speaks to what we've talked about.

Over the course of this year, they've figured out their how, and yesterday they saw that ain't how yesterday they were exposed as when somebody takes away seventy five percent of our how what do we do?

And there was no answer for it yesterday afternoon.

And that's why so many people were frustrated, because they've seen the good football, to use Dave Canalis's term, you've seen the stuff that they can make come alive, as Canalis likes to say, and it was not there yesterday.

And to that point as well, I would also say Canal has seemed a little mad today.

You know, there's you can tell when a coach is defeated and you can tell when a coach is motivated, and I think it was a little it was more of the latter today with Canalis, he was upset.

He took a lot of ownership for what happened and vowed to kind of figure out a path forward from this because he was like, you know, if teams are going to we have to be able to be multifaceted, like if they're going to take away our run game, and this is a team that wants to be a running team, but you can't have no answers if a team takes that away.

And there were still opportunities yesterday there was an effort to push the ball downfield and to answer for it, and the connections didn't happen.

And he kind of challenged Bryce and the receivers today like trust each other, Like don't just say like, oh, this is the play that's called, this is the play I'm going to go run.

Trust that it's gonna happen.

And that's a big point of it as well.

The counter part to that, and what's going to be interesting to see this week is like you don't ever want to let the pendulum swing too much the other way and go, oh, okay, if they're going to take away the run game, we have to push it downfield, and then you start you start searching for plays that aren't there.

I don't think that'll happen.

But just because of how consistent Dave Canalis and Bryce Seanka Ben and you know, their whole thing is like to come in and be the same every day, I don't think they would be reactive in that way.

But I do think there will be a push to kind of make sure that that part of the offense is capable of carrying them.

If teams are going to continue to try to focus on shutting down Rico, which is what the Saints did yesterday.

Yeah, no doubt about it.

And Cuba talked about that a good bit yesterday.

And for a guy who carried the ball three times in a game, you wouldn't think you'd spend a lot of time with Cuba postgame.

But a couple of things happened.

Number One, Cuba Hubbard became the all time leading rusher among Canadian born running backs.

Did you know that?

I did know that.

I put it in a story last night.

I know you did.

It was in inside the Numbers on Panthers dot Com.

I know you guys have already digested all those numbers, already passing Saints legend Ruben Mays on that list.

You know who else is on the list of all time Canadian born running backs?

Do I get a hint?

No, Bronko Nagersky.

How about that?

You be Hubbard greater than Bronco Negersky.

Just I mean, it's just science.

There's no argument with that.

But Chuba was talking, and he lived this life last year before things really got clicking second half of the year, Cuba said, listen, when it doesn't work like that, you've got to be content to take your three to take those grimy runs and keep running them.

And I remember even in the nineties, Dom keepers used to talk about we've got to run with tempo.

That meant running Anthony Johnson into the line of scrimmage twenty five times for eighty two yards and we're going to go for two point seven a carry so many times we wear you out.

And Cuba said, eventually that does work.

And when the Carolina Panthers have worked offensively, that's what it's been.

It's been the run game working.

It's been popping a couple runs, but it's been that steady beat, that rhythm of the offense working, allowing things to get open down the field.

And that's when everything is in sync.

That's when everything works.

But when Rico daldel is held to zero pumps and fifty three yards in a game and working, that ain't what they're looking for here.

And to your point too late last year, when you got into the second half of the season, you did see them push it downfield a little bit more so, I think it's something that is very possible in this offense.

David Moore told me today, he said, we've got the quarterback, We've got the play calling.

We've got the receivers to do this, it's just a matter of doing it.

Last year you had out on feeling for a lot of those plays.

Who steps up this year to kind of take that role and say I'm gonna be there anytime you need me.

You're seeing Tmax still kind of figure out some stuff in the NFL.

He's so good, he's really really good at the hard catches.

They just kind of need him to be great at the easy catches, and you're seeing him definitely get there.

But there is still a little ways to go you need.

You're seeing leget try to get open more.

Like there's still some to David Moore to quote David Moore again, like all the pieces are there now, it's a matter of figuring out how this particular group works together.

And then again, who's gonna step up and kind of take on that id on the un roll of being there when a play has to get made.

Yeah, no doubt, no doubt.

But we could spend all day digging into the details of yesterday's game.

But who wants that, right?

Not a lot of people, I mean, because it did not go the way they had hoped.

I think, more than anything, else, and I have prepared.

I do some graphic design work on the side, not many people.

I was so scared about what he's about.

That's right, I've done some graphic design work.

I don't know if you can read this on the screen.

I can.

What does it say?

Cast It says two and fifteen five and twelve five and five.

Huh do those numbers mean anything?

That is twenty twenty three, twenty twenty four, twenty twenty five.

Oh yeah, things are getting better, gang things.

Things are normalizing, to use one of my favorite football words, things are normalizing to the point where the Carolina Panthers win games and lose games for specific and tangible reasons, not because everything's out here and woo, you know, things are getting weird.

The Carolina Panthers are winning and losing games for reasons we can define and draw boxes around.

And yesterday they lost a game because the New Orleans Saints were determined to not let Rico Dwell run on them, and they did not.

I kind of laughed.

I couldn't help but laugh when Rico was describing it after the game, and he was like heavy boxes right from the start, Safety's dropping in out the sky, it's like the Saints, you know, and they were determined.

I mean it was.

It was as obvious an intent of a defensive game plan as I've seen.

And tomorrow Davis really good at his job.

That guy's been given the Carolina Panthers paint in the neck for a long time, Cam Jordan.

They've got dudes on that side of the ball still, and that's why when you knew that they were going to be that intent to stop the run, they had the people to do it, and they did it.

But on the whole, when you look at what's happened this season, simply having found that how knowing your platform, knowing what's got to happen, and then achieving it as often as not.

I mean, guys, this is different.

And I love the fact that the Carolina Panthers can leave a game and people be angry that it didn't go the way it went half the time.

Yeah, because that ain't five and twelve, and it certainly ain't two and fifteen from a couple of years ago.

The progress that's been made to get to this point as difficult as yesterday was the stomach and again my wife and I said, I just looked at her I said two and fifteen five and twelve five five.

I don't want to hear that right now.

Nobody wanted to hear that Sunday night in the aftermath.

But now that we're here on Monday and things have calmed down, we can accept the fact that, okay, things are getting better systemically.

Now there are problems to fix in the short term.

But I was turning to Austin Corbitt about it today just in general terms in the locker room.

He was around here in twenty twenty three when they played so many different combinations of linemen and it never worked.

I mean, they played seven different left guards, eight different right guards.

I can say that by memory because I lived it, and they gave up sixty five sacks that year.

This year, they've played eight combinations of starting linemen in ten games, and it hasn't been this big disaster movie of a situation with the offensive line because those guys have all been here.

I mean eight combinations on Sunday, but it was eight combinations of dudes who have all been here at least two years, some of them four and five.

So when you play a new combination of people in it includes Zikey and Timo and Cade Mays and Austin and Damian Lewis.

That's so much better than anything they saw in twenty three when everything was getting a little weird.

That allows things to stabilize a little bit.

And I'll be interested to see as this thing goes on what that stabilization looks like.

Right, And you know we've said to talking about being stable.

We've said too from the beginning, like you've got a coach at GM and a quarterback that are on the same timeline, and how much of a difference that makes.

I mean, you look around the NFL just even today and see other teams kind of having to reset, and you can tell that this is still a building process, but one that is actively getting built.

And at times that's stuff.

Anytime you're kind of setting a standard and building a team.

There's gonna be games you lose that you should win.

There's gonna be games you win that you should lose, and then it's gonna be what do you do with the others?

And I think the last two weeks might have been an example of that.

So it's like, Okay, well, now you've got another one coming up.

What are you gonna do with with one.

You know how they're saying baseball like, you lose fifty, win fifty, it's what you do with the other fifty.

Even though I know that math is not right.

That's castiy math.

Yeah, you're gonna win some you're supposed to lose.

You're gonna lose somem you're supposed to win.

What do you do with the others?

Yeah?

And that starts this week.

You still got a lot of division games in front of you.

I mean the other thing that brought it into relief for me last night when I get home from the game, because I tell you, one of the things that happens to me on game days is somebody will say, do you see what the Cowboys did?

Did you see what the Giants did?

You Nope, didn't see any of that.

Saw everything the Carolina Panthers did right here in front of this giant pain.

I will say I was paying attention to the Patriots Bucks score.

Yeah, that's fair, and that one went the way the Carolina Panthers wanted it to.

But when I get home and look at those scores and you realize, oh the Bucks lost, Oh the Buffalo Bills lost to the Miami Dolphins, You realize games like this because we're so hyper focused on what happens right here in front of our face.

In the global perspective of the NFL, stuff like this happens.

There's weirdness every week.

I mentioned last night, I woke up Sunday morning and the Carolina Panthers were a game and a half out of first in the NFC South and if the season ended at that moment, they would have been picking sixteenth in the draft.

Last night when I went to bed, Carolina Panthers were a game and a half out of first place in the NFC South and they'd be picking sixteenth in the draft.

It season ended right now, and it's just it wasn't what they wanted.

But no.

Real yardage was lost on the whole, I mean the stuff they're trying to improve.

And again, no one has set playoffs or anything like that as a benchmark for this season because this season's been about improvement.

This season's been about stabilizing and finding that how I was talking about, and that's still there.

I mean, the football has gotten so much better.

It's hard to imagine what we were looking at this time last year.

Yeah, I mean, if you're walking away from a seventeen to seven loss that puts you at five and five in the middle of the season, and you're mad.

That means you're getting to a place where you're expecting to win, and that's what you if nothing else, thirty thousand foot view, that's what you want.

Yeah, and listen, it's gonna be interesting to see the way this develops over the next couple weeks.

They've got a three week sprint to the bye week, two of them on the road, starting this week in Atlanta.

We'll see our old friends from the Falcons down there in a couple of days.

Then you go to San Francisco speaking old friends Christian McCaffrey and the forty nine ers on Monday Night football in a couple of weeks before you come back to this building and get the Red High A tough one.

Los Angeles Rams, and nobody really wants to run into Matt Stafford and the Rams right now.

At the same time, A lot can happen.

If you're telling me the Carolina Panthers are six and seven or seven six at that point, I'd be like, okay, sure, sounds about right.

It's the how they're getting there that's gonna be the question.

So once they get to that point, there's gonna be another reset.

There's finally gonna be a bye week, and we need a bye week.

Friends, We could we could really use a chance to breathe for a second, because we're now ten weeks into this deal and there are another however many what did I just say?

We got three games to.

Go before the bye We're all going to be doing CASTI math here pretty soon.

So I tease her about math.

She can do math, she really can.

I've seen her do it.

Well.

I did one yesterday that I was like, oh, that was right.

You should stop.

You are a capable woman who is doing math.

It's just not one of them.

Well sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't.

But anyway, the Carolina Panthers got three to go before they get to that bye week, and in it at that point we'll see I mean, if they are sitting here six seven, seven and six, guess what.

There's going to be meaningful games in December.

And it's been a minute since we've said that.

A division games after the bye week.

So three division games after the bye week.

Seattle coming in here for a game that could end up being played in primetime for a big old audience, so a lot of exciting stuff in front of them.

Was that game yesterday what they wanted?

It was not is at the end of the season also no, So we will reset.

We'll get back into this thing later on this week.

By the time we see you on Thursday, they will be fully moved on to the Atlanta Falcons and getting ready for week eleven.

We'll break it down for you.

There's a lot of stuff coming your way between now and then, so keep it locked on the team's YouTube channel, keep it on Panthers dot com for all the latest stuff for our friends at Deep Eddie or podcast.

Matten is adorable baby who's trying to get home and see right now, except we're keeping him over time.

We'll see you Thursday on the next Happy half out, Full Full