Incredibly few 3rd downs on Panthers TD drives

[Jangler]

We need one or three of them one play drives.

[KB_fan]

13 hours ago, PhillyB said:

or is it a fact that drives get touchdowns because they were good enough to not get first downs, rather than the reverse?

Yes, this could well be true.  I wasn't trying to argue cause and effect.  Isolating only TD drives and then saying, "wow the offense is playing well on those drives," is kind of a no-brainer.  Obviously the offense was playing well since they got in the end-zone. 

Nonetheless, the offense can still be playing well and score touchdowns and yet have to convert 3rd downs.  In fact many often consider 3rd down conversion efficiency a key stat of a team's success - you have to convert 3rd downs to have sustained drives.  And if you sustain drives, you're more likely to score...

So I wasn't really trying to claim low numbers of 3rd down attempts = success, or surprised to see that TD drives were more efficient in moving the chains quickly without 3rd downs. 

Yet Panthers are managing 11, 12, 14 play drives with only 1 3rd down in the whole drive, or 7 or 9 play drives with no 3rd downs.  This seems unusual to me, and in fact it did draw attention following the Seattle game.  A number of commentators remarked on the fact that the Panthers faced only 1 3rd down attempt in those final 2 drives (Cotchery's amazing 1 handed catch when he wrestled the ball away from the defender).

If I have time and energy this afternoon, I may try to go back and look at data on 3rd downs for Panthers in 2014 and 2013...

 

[mcdougal]

I have noticed this too. Good observation. When we are hot on offense...we are generally hot. We may not be hot for an entire half or quarter or even back to back drives in the same quarter...but if we gain back to back first downs on a drive, we are generally able to put up some points.

The difference this year (and to my surprise) is that at some point in each game our offense does get hot. It is almost never on the first drive of the game, but at some point during the game our offense gets going and starts putting back to back plays together.

Which is a marked difference from previous years where there would be entire games when our offense failed to put together even one good drive. And given our lack of offensive personnel it is somewhat hard to understand.

But I think credit has to go to Newton and Shula. To Newton, because from the start of pre-season you have seen a concerted effort by him to get the little things right and to speed up the pace of the offense. To run the offense as if it were a professional unit expected to score points no matter the situation. To Shula for building the framework that allows the players to adopt based on a specific coverage.

We are still a little too inconsistent for my taste...at any point our offense can go three and out (even after back to back long scoring drives) but much improvement over the prior seasons.

[KB_fan]

6 hours ago, mcdougal said:

We are still a little too inconsistent for my taste...at any point our offense can go three and out (even after back to back long scoring drives) but much improvement over the prior seasons.

We've been consistent in our inconsistency in several games. 

In Seattle we twice had drives with interceptions followed by drives for touchdowns.

Against Philly we went TD - Interception THREE different times!