About a month ago, the odds were pretty good that no team from the Queen City would be making the playoffs, but the times they are a changin' in Charlotte.
First, while it is the ultimate pipe-dream, the Bobcat's playoff hopes after a 1/5 of the season have not yet circled the bowl. Yes, they have yet to win a game on the road. Yes, though they tend to get double digit leads in most games, teams are quite disrespectful after making their harried comebacks to victory (I'm looking at you, Clippers and Cavs). However, at the moment they are only 2 1/2 games out of the playoff race because the teams in the East are really, really horrible. If the 8th seed was playing .500 ball, the Cats would be 4 games out, but at 4 - 12 they are within striking distance of the 7-10 Celtics. It's truly unfortunate that 8 teams from the East will be making the playoffs.
Second, it might be unfortunate that the "experts" are picking them now, but after being 1-7 (and there was a point in the second half of the 49ers game when I was actually contemplating rooting for them to lose to get better draft picks), the Panthers are somewhat primed for a playoff spot. This has allowed me to continue my tradition of examining all playoff scenarios for the Panthers since their inception (yes, in their 1-15 year I was calculating how many of their agonizing losses had to be reversed for them to have made the playoffs). This actually is the reason behind me writing this article at this point because I was under the impression that they "controlled their destiny" (aka, if they won out they would make the playoffs). However, this actually is not the case due to one of the several losses that will probably haunt them at the end of the year. The loss that could prove most costly is the one to the Seahawks. Even if the Panthers were to beat the Rams and everybody else, the Rams and Seahawks could wind up tied with the Panthers at the end of the year. The Rams would win the division and the Seahawks would get the wild card in that case. Unfortunately, the Panthers don't even have any decent 3 or more way ties to hope for since the only teams they played in the NFC outside of the West should win their divisions (Packers, Eagles) and not tie for a wild card. Thus it is hard to determine what a Panther fan should root for, at least in terms of realism, the Seahawks winning out or losing two more games than the Panthers (remaining schedule: @Vikings, @Jets, Arizona, Atlanta ). The latter seems more realistic since they should easily lose 3 of these games, but judgment will be reserved for Monday. Unfortunately, it will be at least 2 more weeks before the Panthers can truly control their destiny, so all a fan can root for at this point is to "just win, baby".
Posted by shs4 at December 10, 2004 12:43 AM | TrackBack