Panthers head coach Matt Rhule said they counted 18 missed tackles last week and 190 yards after first contact for the Browns, so having that kind of emphasis in Thursday’s padded practice makes sense.
“The stuff we put out on Sunday, it looked bad, all the tackles we missed,” linebacker Damien Wilson said. “We missed a lot of tackles that professional athletes should be able to make. We’re going to practice what you need to practice. If you were playing basketball and blew all your layups in a game, you’re going to practice layups.”
That extra work carried over into watching film. Defensive end Brian Burns said that at linebacker Shaq Thompson‘s suggestion, the linemen and linebackers watched the tape together to get a clearer idea of their perspective. He said there have been similar meetings in the past, but not this early in a season.
“So we watched it with them, and I feel like everybody’s on one page,” Burns said. “I wouldn’t say it’s rare. But it happens. So like the D-line to get together because there’s more than just the run that we’re wanting to watch, and us working our games and going through our rushes doesn’t have anything really to do with the linebackers, so we’ll knock all that out just together. But we really need to attack the run game with the linebackers because they’ll give us certain calls and certain things that they see. And we need that.
“Just so we know what they’re thinking. So when we get in certain situations, certain formations that we see, it might be a call that they want to give us, or a line movement, anything like that. And we need to know pretty much what they’re thinking so we can stay on the same page as them.”
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