CHARLOTTE — The Panthers get a chance to run it back against a team they played perhaps their best game of the season against.
When the Rams beat the Cardinals Sunday afternoon, they earned the fifth seed in the NFC playoffs and the chance to come back to Bank of America Stadium to play the NFC South champion Carolina Panthers next weekend.
The date and time for that game will be announced later tonight.
The Panthers beat the Rams 31-28 here on Nov. 30, and they did it with the kind of complementary football Dave Canales dreams about at night.
They picked off Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford twice, including Mike Jackson's pick-six.
Derrick Brown sealed the win with a late-game strip-sack.
They ran it 40 times for 164 yards.
And quarterback Bryce Young threw a pair of fourth-down touchdowns in the second half, as he authored the 11th of his 12 game-winning drives in the fourth quarter or overtime, the most of anyone in the league since he entered it.
"I just trust my guys; there's no big conversation, no big hoo-rah," Young said that day. "I mean, it's not a big speech. I know this guy's always ready.
"It never wavers. It's a competitive league. There's going to be ups and downs, but I know my guys. I know how they work. I know who they are. I know the competitors they are. No matter what, I'll always have confidence in them, so I'll never change."
It's always hard to beat a team twice in a season (except the Falcons this year, which is the reason they broke the three-way tie and won the division title), but the recency comes with advantages as well.
"It's an opportunity to correct some things that we wanted to correct and try to replicate things that were successful for us," Panthers head coach Dave Canales said Sunday night. "But it gives you a little bit of familiarity and confidence to know, OK, this is a team that we've seen before, we've played them tough.
"And thinking about the Rams coming in and getting that win, ... seeing that opponent and how disciplined they are and how focused. We've got to see what happens and what shakes out here to know who we're playing, but the familiarity gives a level of confidence to know who we're going up against and how to prepare."
