Published: Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2009 / Updated: Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2009 09:18 AM

It's time to give Delhomme a break

CHARLOTTE -- The kindest and corniest of optimists might suggest Jake Delhomme ought to get a shot at Arizona on Sunday, thinking he could right things against the team that started his nightmare slide.

But maybe the best reason for giving Delhomme the weekend off has to do with the opponent also, but not the Cardinals in general.

There's a school of thought that Delhomme's career would be done if he's replaced, that the time off would equate to a professional death sentence.

But if anyone is an example that you can in fact hit reset on a career, it's Arizona quarterback Kurt Warner — an old friend and former teammate of Delhomme's in NFL Europe, and the guy he ought to be looking to for advice.

Unlike Warner, Delhomme has never won a league MVP trophy and never will. But they do share a past, a pedigree. That's the reason they have had to go to war for every opportunity.

If you're drafted in the first round, ordained a good player without the pesky trouble of playing a game in the NFL, teams will trip over themselves to give you chances. That's partly because of the money invested, and partly because of the simple prejudice against guys who came up the nontraditional path. Evaluators are human beings, and if they decide early on that you can't play, changing their minds would mean admitting they were once wrong.

Because of that, quarterbacks such as Warner and Delhomme have to defend themselves constantly, making every game they get to play a weekly referendum on their future.

Long past are Warner's wonder-boy days, when he became the St. Louis starter by accident and led the Rams to unimaginable heights. Then the Rams decided they would prefer Marc Bulger.

That was followed by a one-year stint with the New York Giants, where he was a placeholder for rookie Eli Manning. In Arizona, different coaches have decided he was a lesser option than Josh McCown and Matt Leinart. At particular moments, they might have been right.

And still, he remains, playing at a high level.

Despite his disastrous stretch of games since last year's playoff loss to the Cardinals, Delhomme is not a horrible quarterback. He's a quarterback who has always played at an above-average level, who is in the middle of a horrible slump.

At 34 with a 2-year-old throwing arm, he is far from finished — and not just because the Panthers still have another $12 million in guaranteed money heading his way.

The idea that his arm is shot seems convenient, but lacks any basis in medical fact. The idea that he never was that good and is simply reverting has grown in popularity over the last 10 months, but ignores the simple calculus of wins to losses and touchdowns to interceptions. He has always had more of the good than the bad halves of those ratios, by a wide margin that has been slimming only recently.

Delhomme at his best has been enough of a quarterback to lead a good team to a win. The guys who can make bad teams something other than what they are are rare, richer and generally named Manning or Brady.

None are named Matt Moore, and the idea that he will save the season insults the intelligence of reasonable people. Even as poorly as Delhomme is playing, coach John Fox admitted Monday he is still the best quarterback on the roster.

So the priority for the Panthers should be to get Delhomme fixed, not to get rid of him.

They need to proceed carefully, and look at themselves in the process.

If Delhomme has an evident problem at the moment, it's that he appears overcoached, like he's going through a checklist when dropping back. That never has been and never will be his strength.

He's too late in the game to become a textbook quarterback, but is still salvageable.

But to get there, he will have to show a little more fight, the kind he has displayed his whole career.

There's no reason to think he will stop swinging, but at the moment he doesn't appear ready to throw enough punches.

Delhomme was asked Monday afternoon about his emotions after the last kick-to-the-gut loss. He talked about the numbness of the night before, and how if flowed into the frustration of Monday upon watching the film three times through.

But nowhere in the conversation did he mention anger, at himself or anyone else. That's the next step, and it will be followed by some determined work.

At the moment, however, the best thing for everyone might be to give Delhomme a break from the negative feedback, a chance to catch his breath and figure out how to get back to himself. And while he's in Arizona, maybe he can catch up with his old friend Warner, and ask him how best to go about it.