Pick a Team: The Carolina Panthers

Well, I suppose it serves me right. After 50 or so years as a Cleveland Browns fan, I lost the feeling. And in the first game of my new life, the Browns win a road season opener (first time in 28 years) on a last-second 58-yard field goal after a pretty absurd roughing-the-passer penalty goes their way.

And I was trying to root for the other team.

Maybe all this time it wasn’t the Browns at all. Maybe all of the heartache and heartburn and insanity and inanity of the Cleveland Browns over the last half century are entirely my fault. Maybe the Browns made the best move they could possibly make by selling their souls and future for Deshaun Watson and finally getting me and my bad juju out. It’s worth considering.

In any case, in Week 1, I tried my best to be a Carolina Panthers fan.

I’ve lived in Charlotte for a good while now … but I have never felt any particular feelings at all for the Panthers. I sort of rooted for them to win Super Bowl 50, which happened to fall on our younger daughter’s 11th birthday. Then they stunk up the place, particularly on offense — Cam Newton was obviously exposed to Kryptonite — and I was reminded that I really don’t need any more luckless losers in my life. I have enough of those already.

So, I have done a pretty good job of completely ignoring the Carolina Panthers … though, I must admit that is not an especially hard thing to do. I mean the whole nation does a pretty good job ignoring that Panthers. They are one of the more ignorable teams in all of sports. A couple of weeks ago, Mike Schur and I on the PosCast drafted teams that inspire absolutely no feelings in us as fans — we don’t like them, don’t dislike them, don’t care whatsoever if they win or lose or fold or host “Saturday Night Live.”

I must admit that Mike got the best pick in the draft — the Orlando Magic. I care so little about the Magic that I forgot they even existed, which is why I didn’t draft them first overall.

Anyway, the Panthers are high on that list.

But as my daughter Katie and I search for a new team, the Panthers offered some interesting benefits. One, we do live in Charlotte. As such, we are connected to the team in various ways. I have seen Christian McCaffrey in restaurants. The Panthers’ top draft pick, Ickey Ekwonu, went to our girls’ high school (and was, by all accounts, a sheer delight, a member of the chorus, a person who high-fived everybody in the hallway, etc.). I do not care about the Panthers, so much, but I always did like Luke Kuechly, who was an all-world linebacker and a star of various local commercials.

Two, they got Baker Mayfield.

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Now, yes, it’s true, my feelings as a fan about Baker Mayfield are pretty scattered. When the Browns drafted him No. 1 overall in 2018, I was thrilled. In retrospect, sure, Josh Allen was the pick, and if not Allen then Lamar Jackson, but anyone can draft in retrospect. In reality, the 2000 NFL draft went like follows:

1. Cleveland: Courtney Brown

2. Washington: Lavar Arrington

In retrospect, the draft might have gone like this:

1. Cleveland: Tom Brady (199th pick)

2. Washington: Brian Urlacher (9th pick)

Anyway, at the time, I thought Mayfield was the best choice for the Browns — this was a team that had played something like 4,394,270 quarterbacks in the previous decade; Mayfield brought energy and fun and charisma and an edge. Then he started playing, and he was terrific, and the team took on a whole new persona with him out there. He was funny in television commercials. He was cheeky in interviews. It was great.

Then the next year, he was absolutely terrible.

Then the next year, he was terrific again, and he took the Browns to the playoffs for the first time since 1843, and the quality of his commercials went up even higher, and the future was so bright, we all had to wear shades.*

*It always baffled me that Corey Hart’s “Sunglasses at Night” and Timbuk 3’s “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades,” were hits at roughly the same time. It didn’t seem like sunglasses were interesting enough to inspire two hit songs, but there you go. By the way, a little Timbuk 3 trivia to share with your friends: Apparently “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades,” is actually not a goofy song about a guy who’s getting good grades, loving life and looking at a future so bright he has to wear shades. No, it’s a merciless warning about the impending nuclear holocaust. So, yeah, I totally misinterpreted that one.

And then, last year, Mayfield was so utterly terrible that the Browns felt like they had to do anything and everything they could to get unapologetic sexual harasser and assaulter Deshaun Watson, whom they had purposely not drafted multiple times just four years earlier.

So, yeah, mixed feelings about Mayfield.

Mayfield in a Panthers uniform was new; the last-second heartbreak was all too familiar. (Eakin Howard/Getty Images)

But so it goes, you know, he’s kind of family, and you can’t help but root for family. Katie and I sat in to watch Mayfield take on his former team … and for a half, he was unspeakably awful. I mean, sure, sometimes a quarterback can have an off-game, but Mayfield looked like he had never actually played football before. He kept dropping snaps. He ran around the pocket in a panic. At one point he had a wide-open receiver over the middle and he threw the ball like eight seconds later, but made up for it by throwing it five feet over the receiver’s head, directly into a defensive back’s hands; it was one of the worst throws I’ve ever seen.

After that throw, there was a shot of Mayfield on the sidelines looking at the play with quarterback coach Sean Ryan, and they were talking, and Katie and I thought the conversation went something like this:

Ryan: “OK, see that guy over there?”

Mayfield: “You mean the one who caught the ball?”

Ryan: “Yeah, that guy. He’s on the other team.”

Mayfield: “Oh. Yeah, I see that now.”

Ryan: “OK, so in the future, you will want to throw the ball to this guy [circles receiver] rather than that guy.”

Mayfield: “Ah, that makes sense.”

Here’s how bad Mayfield was — when he was introduced at the start of the game, the crowd cheered like mad. They were booing him well before halftime. The Browns led 20-7 after three quarters.

And I felt … sort of numb. I’m not going to lie: Rooting for the Panthers was not taking hold. I really like McCaffrey, but they do not seem interested in giving him the ball too much; probably because he’s been super-brittle the last couple years. I really like D.J. Moore, too, but they didn’t seem to know how to get him the ball. As for Ickey, delightful as he is, it was his first game, and Myles Garrett ran around him with such ease that you weren’t really sure that the Panthers had fully explained the whole concept of blocking. Then, Myles Garrett makes a lot of people look bad, even those who have been in the NFL for a long time.

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I should probably say a quick word about what it felt like watching the Browns now — that word “numb” keeps coming back to me. The only time I felt any real feelings was when Nick Chubb carried the ball. I love Nick Chubb. I couldn’t really root against him. But as for the rest … eh. I didn’t really feel much of anything. I’m just being as honest as I can; that’s part of this whole “Pick and team” experience. I thought maybe there would be some leftover warmth for the Browns. But, Chubb aside, there really wasn’t.

Back to the game: The fourth quarter was better as a one-game Panthers fan. Much of that is because Mayfield was better. Whatever you want to say about Mayfield, he’s a competitor and the juices started flowing, and he ran for a touchdown (throwing the ball hard at the wall in celebration) and then he connected with Robbie Anderson on a really sweet, 75-yard touchdown pass.

Katie and I started to get into the game. The Panthers got the ball back, down by two with 2:14 left, and Mayfield found D.J. Moore for 26, and then everybody remembered that McCaffrey existed, and the Browns had the ball on the Cleveland 15 with 1:27 left.

And then there were the mixed feelings. What should the Panthers do? The Browns had all three of their timeouts, so one thought was that the Panthers should run the ball three straight time, make Cleveland use all of their timeouts, and then kick the go-ahead field goal.

Another thought was that they should go for the throat. Mayfield was looking good. The offense was looking good. The crowd was into it. What is it that Matt Damon said? Right: Fortune favors the bold. And while, yes, he said that as part of a pyramid scheme, that doesn’t make it any less irresistible. I mean, the Panthers stunk last year and stunk the year before that and stunk the year before that and weren’t any good the year before that, and wasn’t this a good time to show that things finally will be different?

Apparently not. The Panthers ran the ball three straight times and kicked the field goal.

There was 1:13 left when the Browns got the ball back, down by just one. On first down, Jacoby Brissett dropped back and got hit by Brian Burns as he released the ball. The officials called Burns for roughing the passer. I have always tried to be fair as a fan, tried hard to see each play clearly, even if it helped/hurt my team. It looked to me like an absolutely terrible call.

But, being honest, I don’t know if I would have felt that way as a Browns fan.

Anyway, that happened, Brissett completed two more passes and Cade York, a rookie, kicked a 58-yard field goal that would have been good from 70, at least, maybe 75. Of course they got a great kicker after I stopped caring. And the Cleveland Browns won.

And, in the end, no, it won’t be the Panthers for me. There was no connection there. I hope for the best for Baker and if I see McCaffrey around town again I’ll try to say hello, and I’ll always be rooting for Ickey. But all in all, Week 1 was a flop. On to the next team …