Panthers burning question: Can McCaffrey help Newton return to MVP form?
The diminutive back should help the Panthers offense improve in 2017
By
Will Brinson
•
6 min read
Things went south in a hurry for the Carolina Panthers in 2016 following an ugly Super Bowl 50 loss. Despite minimal turnover, particularly on offense, Carolina fell off a cliff last year, finishing the season 25th in Football Outsiders offensive metrics after ranking eighth during their Super Bowl run.
Several factors were in play, including a late-season shoulder injury to quarterback Cam Newton that required offseason surgery. Mike Shula's offense became bland and predictable. Kelvin Benjamin, returning from an ACL injury, was a major disappointment. The Devin Funchess training camp hype from last year is comically tragic in hindsight.
Carolina zagged in a major way this offseason, eschewing the previous offensive approach and utilizing its first two picks of the 2017 NFL Draft on Christian McCaffrey and Curtis Samuel, a pair of horizontal weapons made for a modern offensive approach. McCaffrey, particularly, is expected to be a part of a renovated gameplan designed to improve Newton's efficiency and minimize the number of hits the quarterback takes.
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Taking the load off Cam
The Panthers previous offensive personnel was constructed with Newton in mind -- acquire big-body receivers who could improve Newton's accuracy. But on the way to that football nirvana, an awkward thing happened: the Panthers forgot to maximize Newton's protection and they decided that sprinting tall, slow receivers down the field in 3rd-and-3 situations would be a net positive.
It's great that everyone is running routes past the sticks, but there is a whole bunch of unused grass on the field at the above point of Newton's dropback. And there is a Rams defender bearing down on Cam too. The combination of unopened receivers and unblocked defenders is a bad one.
This sort of playcalling begs for a short-yardage weapon who can exploit the middle of the field.
Imagine McCaffrey running a route that originates out of the backfield and cuts back across the middle of the field here. Obviously he would have a defender on him (one would hope) but there is room to roam.
Part of the change will have to come in terms of the decision-making too. The Panthers aren't afraid to split a running back out wide. They did just that with Jonathan Stewart in the same game, with Stewart motioning out of the backfield and lining up at the top of the screen.
Cam has to look his way, but if McCaffrey is squatting on the hash with a defender more than 10 yards away while four slow-developing vertical routes draw everyone down the field, he could do some damage. Counterpoint: Stewart didn't get a sniff here. And this is when the red flags start flying -- what if Mike Shula's plan just involves using McCaffrey in the same offense? The concept of just plugging McCaffrey into the current offense and hoping it works as a gameplan should give Panthers fans fits at night.
Especially when there are just swaths of open field waiting for the shifty Stanford star. The 2016 Panthers passing game was basically "wait four seconds and hope Cam can embed the ball into someone's chest down the field."
Off the deep end
This strategy would be great if you were employing a receiving corps that routinely won in man coverage. More often the Panthers success in the passing game felt like a situation where the defense just screwed up and forgot to cover Greg Olsen appropriately.
The modern NFL game is about utilizing space and last year the Panthers basically ignored anything within 10 yards of the line of scrimmage, instead assuming Benjamin and Funchess could win down the field. According to Cian Fahey's Pre Snap Reads QB Catalogue, Newton threw 13.83 percent of his passes more than 21 yards downfield.
That's a fairly astonishing number -- it trailed only Ben Roethlisberger in terms of deep passes attempted. But Roethlisberger also ranked sixth in terms of balls thrown to/behind the line of scrimmage. Newton? 27th. Cam threw more passes 21 yards or further down the field last year than he threw to the line of scrimmage. Newton also ranked 33rd in terms of passes attempted between 1-5 yards.
Let the club do the work
In order for McCaffrey to make the impact everyone expects from a top-10 draft pick, the Panthers will need to dramatically change how they approach their offense. If the goal is indeed to maximize Cam's efficiency and minimize the number of hits he takes in a given game, Shula needs to take a piece of golfing advice and "let the club do the work."
Stanford was smart about this with McCaffrey, consistently utilizing him in situations involving screens and passes out of the backfield. This is a simple screen pass on a second and 12 that was diagnosed relatively well by Cal's defense. It still resulted in 13 yards thanks to McCaffrey's shiftiness.
Frequently Stanford's offense would just feature McCaffrey out in the flat, including a pair of passes against UCLA.
Good luck with that linebacker covering McCaffrey out of the backfield on third down, regardless of what level of football we're talking about.
The Panthers rarely passed to their running backs in 2016, with Cam completing a total of 44 passes to backs (25 to Fozzy Whittaker, 10 to Mike Tolbert, eight to Jonathan Stewart and one to Cameron Artis-Payne). That's not the most explosive group of running backs in the league.
McCaffrey, who caught 45 balls in 2015 and 37 last year despite playing in just 11 games, should change that. Plus the rookie into the spot occupied by Whittaker at the bottom of the screen below and it's not hard to imagine a more successful result than what Carolina created. Space, space, space.
New personnel, same scheme?
But a couple of things stand out that could be concerning when it comes to the utilization of McCaffrey in Carolina's offense.
First, this pass play is fairly sub-optimal. The Falcons snuffed out the throw to the flat easily and have three guys converging on Whittaker before he even has the ball near his hands. All the while, the rest of Carolina's receivers are covered and there's a safety waiting to clean up any mess that might spill over. Running a different route on that side of the field from the wideout might have helped clear things out a little bit more.
Second, the Panthers don't sound like they plan on changing up all that much from an offensive standpoint.
"Our offense is what we run, it's been what we've run for the last five, six years," Olsen said during training camp recently. "We don't re-invent ourselves every year. There are always little wrinkles, little nuances that we address in the offseason."
There isn't some need to just blow everything up and start over. Not yet anyway. This is a Panthers offense that led the NFL in scoring during the 2015 season, with basically the same personnel the team featured last year. It's more about the playcalling from Shula and maximizing the strengths of the personnel. The plan for this story was, frankly, a lot more optimistic before spending a ton of time watching the Panthers on GamePass. Spend enough time engrossed in the Panthers gameplan from last year and you can convince yourself pretty easily that they'll figure out a way to mismanage McCaffrey.
Having Newton hang in the pocket behind a questionable offensive line and wait for below-average receivers to get open on slow-developing routes isn't just a bad idea. It's how you end up with Newton overcooking every throw and way too many heaves to Olsen on the sideline, hoping he can reel in another one-handed grab. It's dangerous too.
McCaffrey's addition should allow Shula the freedom to use more of the space available to him on the field while freeing up other Panthers players by drawing tons of attention from the defense. If Carolina plays to McCaffrey's strengths, Cam and Carolina should experience a significant statistical bounceback across the board.
