CHARLOTTE – The Falcons' offensive line knew the Panthers were coming hard, but they couldn't do anything about it.
“It looked terrible,” Falcons receiver Roddy White said. “It looked bad. It looked like bad football.”
The Panthers, who blitzed the Falcons relentlessly, had five sacks, 11 quarterback hits and held the Falcons running backs to 55 yards on 15 carries.
“They did a good job of just blitzing us,” White said. “They came right after us and played man on the backside. We didn’t get it done. We didn’t get the ball in people’s hands to move the chains.”
The Falcons were shutout in the 38-0 loss for the first time since Tampa Bay beat the Falcons 27-0 on Dec. 5, 2004.
Since opening the season with a 5-0 mark, the Falcons offense has been dysfunctional. After getting down 21-0, the Falcons failed to take any shots down the field. Part of the reason may have been related to the pass protection.
The Falcons don’t appear to have any answers on how to fix the offense.
“Man, I don’t know,” White said. “We’ve got to go back to the drawing board. We have to go back and look at everything that we are doing. Playing hard just (is not) enough. We have to do more.”
The Falcons drove to Carolina’s 20-yard line in the second quarter, but promptly had a 26-yard loss on a sack and fumble that was recovered by Julio Jones.
There only other scoring-threat was White getting stopped on the 2-yard line on a fourth-and-6 in the fourth quarter.
“We couldn’t get it going,” White said. “We had penalties or we had too many three and-outs. We got into third-and-short a couple of times and we didn’t convert on third down.”
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