Panthers' late-game struggles show a team learning how to win

[Sir Purr]

Still, doing that is a learned process. The Panthers are a young team with a new coaching staff. Now that they're more than halfway through the 2020 season, those factors aren't necessarily as significant. But Rhule does believe that teams need to learn how to win, and those lessons come in three stages.


"You're not going to win very many games, or even stick in very many games, when you have 12 penalties," Rhule said. "So we have to eliminate the things that cause you to lose — that's penalties, turnovers. We didn't turn the ball over, so we gave ourselves a chance to win."


It's then about realizing that even though games may come down to the wire, there are plays in every quarter that determine the ultimate outcomes.


"There's so many things you can point back to and say, well if we would've done this, or if we would've done that," Rhule said. "And a lot of times what happens is people want to win so badly, they try to play outside themselves and outside the system, and we end up doing silly things."


As it relates to the latest loss to the Chiefs, Rhule felt like there were plenty of good things, but he also noticed too much of the bad that causes teams to lose games.


"That falls on me, number one, the coaching staff, number two, and then the players," Rhule said. "So I think when you start to believe that you're not going to beat yourself, so you eliminate the bad football. And then you start to realize, 'I don't have to do anything special.' Like Michael Jordan and those guys used to say: 'Let the game come to me. I just have to do my job, play hard, and when the plays come, I go make the plays.'


"Once you learn it and you learn it the right way where it's not just a mindset of, 'Some great player's got to go make a great play,' when you believe that we have to function as a team and execute down the stretch, then that doesn't go away. That breeds consistency. So that's where we are right now."