Thanks to their 37-23 win over the Detroit Lions on Saturday, the Carolina Panthers find themselves in a fascinating position.
Their record is only 6-9 on the season and they are guaranteed to finish with a losing record for the fifth straight year and sixth time in the past seven years.
But because the rest of the NFC South is so bad, they are in a position to not only make the playoffs, but also host a playoff game if they can just win their last two games of the season at Tampa Bay and at New Orleans.
Is that asking a lot for a 6-9 team to go on the road against divisional opponents and win out? Maybe. But it’s also entirely doable, especially given their recent run. After Saturday’s convincing win over a Detroit team that has been one of the hottest teams in the league in the second half of the season, they are now 4-2 in their past six games, with the only two losses coming in close games to Baltimore and Pittsburgh.
They are very much in it, and even in the driver’s seat not needing any help from anybody else. All they have to do is win.
What makes all of it so improbable is the sequence of events that has led them to this position.
For starters, they play in the worst division in football where every team entered the weekend at least two games under .500.
They have also completely gutted significant parts of the organization in season and been using a revolving door of mediocre quarterbacks.
They fired head coach Matt Rhule after a 1-5 start and replaced him with Steve Wilks, who has taken a team that looked totally defeated and led them to a 5-5 record in his first 10 games.
As for the quarterback situation, they started the year with Baker Mayfield under center, eventually replaced him with P.J. Walker, waived Mayfield, and then turned to their other reclamation project in Sam Darnold.
Darnold has not been a game-changer, but he has played mistake-free football and not thrown an interception in his four starts, in which Carolina has a 3-1 record.
As if those changes were not enough, they also traded away two of their top skill position players when the season looked lost by sending Robbie Anderson to Arizona and superstar running back Christian McCaffrey to the San Francisco 49ers.
While the McCaffrey trade seemed like the true give-up moment for the Panthers’ season, the new running back duo of D’Onta Foreman and Chubba Hubbard has been sensational in his absence. The two have combined for six 100-yard games while the Panthers have been one of the best running teams in the league over the second half of the season.
The Panthers are still a very flawed team, but the fact they did not give up on their season and now have a very real chance of hosting a playoff game in a couple of weeks is one of the more improbable storylines of the season.
