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November 10, 2003
Panthers silence Bucs
Carolina rallies for 27-24 victory after blowing lead
By Joe Menzer | JOURNAL REPORTER
When it was all said and done yesterday at Ericsson Stadium, all that Brentson Buckner of the Carolina Panthers was looking for was a simple handshake.
He didn't get one from Warren Sapp or Simeon Rice of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. But Buckner went home happy anyway, satisfied with the fact that the Panthers' remarkable 27-24 victory in front of 69,743 moved his team closer to an NFC South division championship.
Rice had guaranteed a victory for the Bucs, saying before the game that he and Sapp and fellow defensive lineman Anthony McFarland would control the line of scrimmage and therefore the outcome of the game.
What happened instead was that the Bucs' vaunted defense could not stop a final scoring drive by the Panthers and failed to protect what had been a 24-20 lead with barely one minute left. The Panthers capped their six-play, 78-yard winning drive with a 5-yard touchdown pass from quarterback Jake Delhomme to wide receiver Steve Smith with 1:06 remaining.
Then Buckner and the rest of the Carolina defense held off Tampa Bay's final charge, leaving Buckner in search of a congratulatory handshake and word from Sapp and Rice. The usually talkative but beaten Bucs offered neither.
"They don't talk to us. That's the most disrespectful thing," Buckner said. "We're fighting out there in the game, but come on, you're not man enough to shake my hand when I beat you? That just shows what kind of people they are.
"When they're on top, they want to shake your hand and talk. But as soon as they lose, they want to go run and hide and point their fingers at everything."
The Bucs won the NFC South last year and went on to win the Super Bowl. But now it's the Panthers who are sitting atop the division, and in great shape with seven regular-season games left.
"I thought today was a huge step for us," Coach John Fox of the Panthers said.
With yesterday's win - which came without star running back Stephen Davis, who sat out with an ankle injury - the 7-2 Panthers moved three games ahead of the 4-5 Bucs in the NFC South and now own the tiebreaker advantage over both the Bucs and the 4-5 New Orleans Saints.
The Panthers swept the season series from both of those teams. After going 1-5 within the division last season, the Panthers are 5-0 this season with a Dec. 7 game at Atlanta the only remaining divisional game on their schedule.
Cornerback Reggie Howard said that the Panthers are trying not to look at the big picture just yet but added that it's almost impossible now that they're so close to clinching their division and the NFC playoff berth that comes with it.
"We definitely control our own destiny, which is what you want. We're in the driver's seat now," he said.
The Bucs seemed to be sitting there yesterday when quarterback Brad Johnson burned Howard and the Panthers' defense for a 36-yard touchdown pass to Keenan McCardell for a 21-20 lead with 4:52 remaining. McCardell made an outstanding catch as Howard and two other defenders - cornerback Ricky Manning and strong safety Mike Minter - converged on him.
"I have to give my hat off to him. He made a great catch. He caught it one-handed and with his inside arm. That was just a great catch by him," Howard said.
It gave the Bucs their first lead. The Panthers had taken an early 7-0 lead on a 29-yard interception return by Minter before the game was four minutes old and had built a 20-7 advantage after a 66-yard touchdown pass from Delhomme to wide receiver Ricky Proehl with 3:58 left in the third quarter.
But Delhomme did not deliver immediately after McCardell's catch had put the Bucs ahead. In fact, he made Carolina's situation worse on the next possession by throwing an absolutely awful pass that was intercepted by cornerback Tim Wansley and returned to the Carolina 24-yard line.
"I was trying to roll out, and I got flushed a little bit, and I thought I threw the ball away. I really did. But I didn't get enough on it," Delhomme said. "That was a terrible, terrible play on my part."
It wasn't his only one. Earlier in the game, he had given the Bucs their first touchdown on a similar pass that Wansley also intercepted and ran back 23 yards for the score. But after Wansley's second interception, the Carolina defense held the Bucs to a 39-yard field goal by Martin Gramatica that kept it at 24-20.
All that meant was that Delhomme, fresh off his throw that led to Wansley's second interception, had to drive the Panthers nearly 80 yards for a touchdown in the final 2:41. Remarkably, he didn't need that much time.
He sandwiched completions to tight end Kris Mangum and wide receiver Karl Hankton around one incompletion, then found Proehl deep for a 29-yard gain to the Tampa Bay 27. On the next play, Delhomme beat a Bucs blitz by unloading a pass that hung in the air like a hot-air balloon before wide receiver Muhsin Mu-hammad grabbed it for a 22-yard gain to the Tampa Bay 5.
Then Delhomme drilled a pass to Smith for the go-ahead touchdown with 1:06 still remaining. The Panthers' defense subsequently held after the Bucs made one first down to move out to their own 41-yard line, and all that was left to deliver were the handshakes.
In the end, the Panthers' defense made the plays it needed to at the end, and the Bucs' defense did not. That fact was not lost on Buckner.
"If you look at it statistically, they're a better defense than us. They're up there. They've got the sacks and all that, which is what they care about," Buckner said. "What we care about is when you look in the win-loss columns, ours says 7-2 and theirs says 4-5. That's the only thing I'm worried about."
• Joe Menzer can be reached at jmenzer@wsjournal.com