It all comes back to Peppers

By Darin Gantt - daringantt@carolina.rr.com

CHARLOTTE -- It's not Julius Peppers' fault he broke his right hand in New Orleans, and it's certainly not his fault Thomas Davis went down the same day or Jordan Gross the next week.

But the longer this season drags on — slowly, painfully — the clearer it becomes that everything that has happened to the Panthers can be traced back to him, for better or mostly worse.

When it's over and the history of the 2009 Panthers is written — and that will be in six weeks, no longer — the decision to keep Peppers with the franchise tag will be the defining one.

You have little choice but to respect the Panthers' conviction in hanging onto their asset. They believe in drafting their own, grooming them and keeping them. But this one came with a streak of stubbornness attached, a heels-dug-in stance (which sure seems driven from on high) that no matter how much Peppers talked about it, they weren't letting him out of Charlotte.

On the surface, it makes sense. Hard to run a Tampa-2 defense like Ron Meeks wanted to without pass rush from the front four, and there's no better source of it than Peppers.

But that came with a price. A $16.7 million one, to be precise.

The number, a million per game and change, would become a millstone on the weeks he played poorly or they lost. When they won and he played well, it's the cost of doing business.

But the problem with tagging him to that extent was always as much about the expectations and the opportunity cost as the dollars and cents.

When a player takes up an eighth or more of your salary cap, he has to produce every single week. The Colts can stomach the big number for Peyton Manning, because he has a hand in every result. Same with the Patriots and Tom Brady.

But no defensive end, no matter how good, can say they have affected every one of their team's results.

So Peppers — whether it was sleepwalking through the first three games, or playing one-armed bandit the last two — can't claim to have had an impact in half the Panthers' games this year.

Playing with his broken hand, which leaves him limited to pass-rushing and only from the right side, means the Panthers' million bucks are buying them a situational player. By taking him off the field for running downs, you protect the injury, but also take away the half of the game he might be better at. The thing that has always separated Peppers from the Dwight Freeneys of the world is that he is better than solid on first down. He's exceptional.

Now he can't grab a tackle and throw them down, he can't run down a back from behind and bring them down with his hands, because he only has one.

That's not to say he's malingering. He isn't. Watch him in practice, fiddling with his cast and protective gear, and you can tell he's trying to adjust things so he can do as much as possible.

But for the Panthers, it's simply not enough anymore.

Where keeping Peppers mostly hurt them this year was in the way it robbed them of their depth.

Granted, paying bump-on-log backups such as Landon Johnson and James Anderson more than a million for the season is also part of that equation. But for the most part, the conscious decision was made to swallow the big number for Peppers in order to bring back 21 of 22 starters.

Then Maake Kemoeatu went down, triggering a mad scramble (and, frankly, some of Marty Hurney's best work) to find qualified defensive tackle help. Then one of those guys went down.

Then came Davis. Then came Gross.

There simply aren't enough qualified bodies to turn this into a playoff team at this point, and very few teams who could lose their game-changing linebacker and Pro Bowl left tackle and fairly be expected to make such a charge.

By extension, their special-teams struggles can also be drawn back to Peppers, the Patient Zero in this epidemic.

Without funds to adequately fill the backup positions, the Panthers are filling kick coverage and return units with odd parts, and guys who were never good special teamers to begin with. The fact that an undrafted rookie receiver such as Charly Martin can go from practice squad to active roster in a week speaks to special teams coach Danny Crossman's desperation. He essentially is trying to play high stakes poker with Old Maid cards, and not surprisingly, it ain't working.

But for all the issues, all you need to do to realize the frustration of this season is watch Peppers try to play in his current state. He's not able to do much, but he's giving what he has, and the Panthers are trying to jimmy the lock as best they can.

Basically, they have no choice but to get what they can out of him.

Come to think of it, that's a novel idea, and it's looking more and more like what they should have tried this offseason.