News
Email
Print
Painful: Delhomme watches video of loss
AP Photo
Jake Delhomme listens to an assistant coach after an interception.
ADVERTISEMENT
Published: January 12, 2009
CHARLOTTE - It was a horror film, and Jake Delhomme knew how it ended.
But Delhomme had to have another look anyway yesterday morning, as the Carolina Panthers cleaned out their lockers and split up for the offseason.
Delhomme threw five interceptions and coughed up a fumble in the Panthers' 33-13 loss to the Arizona Cardinals on Saturday night, and while others skipped any film study, Delhomme had to see precisely how it went wrong.
"As easy as it can be to want to sweep it under the rug, you want to see," Delhomme said. "You want to turn it on and look at it and get some closure to it."
The five interceptions were a career worst for Delhomme, and also wound up being a franchise record and one shy of the NFL playoff record.
The fumble, on a play where Arizona's Antonio Smith sacked Delhomme, stripped him of the ball and recovered it all in one, set up Arizona's first touchdown. The five interceptions -- one each by Dominique Rogers-Cromartie, Gerald Hayes, Antrel Rolle, Ralph Brown and Rod Hood -- were turned into four Neil Rackers field goals. So all but seven of the Cardinals' points came after turnovers.
Here's what Delhomme saw on the film.
"The fumble, I credit them," he said. "The guy had his head turned to me and just swiped. Then we had Steve (Smith) coming open (on the first interception) and it was just one of those deals. I made a bad throw and it's very disappointing. The next one, I was going to go to Moose (Muhsin Muhammad) and I didn't see the corner. Same with the next one, they came on a blitz and I didn't see the backside linebacker. He read my eyes. So that's disappointing.
"I'll be honest with you, the rest of them, I forced them. I was just trying to make something happen. So that was part of it. You hate that it had to happen that way, but it did."
The only thing he made happen, instead, was a loud chorus of boos from an angry, rain-soaked crowd at Bank of America Stadium.
Delhomme was quick to take the blame in the post-game interviews on Saturday night, and that didn't change yesterday.
He said he knew he was the goat, and would be viewed that way by fans.
"And they should (blame him)," he said. "But honestly, will that make me feel worse than I feel now? Absolutely not. What I feel inside, I never anticipated in a million years that we would go out and play that way, or that I would have a hand in playing the way I did. You kind of wonder, was it worth watching all that film last week? Was it worth studying? That is part of it. You have those days and you'd like for them to come few and far between. It's unfortunate that it came in the biggest game of the year."
Delhomme finished 17 of 34 for 205 yards, but even those numbers were skewed by a meaningless drive in the final minutes that ended with an 8-yard touchdown pass to Steve Smith with 50 seconds left.
Delhomme's quarterback rating was 39. It was his worst in eight playoff games, and was his third-worst of the season. The worst was a 12.3 rating in a win at Oakland, when he was 7 for 27 for 72 yards with four interceptions. The second-worst was a 38.6 rating in a loss at Tampa Bay, when he threw three interceptions.
He said he slept "a little bit" Saturday night, but not much.
"Whether or not I turned the ball over, if we would have lost I don't know how much I would have slept anyway," Delhomme said. "You work so hard to get to this point. That is what you play for -- to be in the final eight. It's tough. It's certainly disappointing to have it end the way it did because we had so many more highs than lows."
That's another thing that was hard to fathom, how things could go so bad so suddenly.
He came into Saturday night's game after his highest-rated game of the season, a 129.2 rating in a win at New Orleans when he was 14 of 20 for 250 yards and one touchdown, with no interceptions. He had not been intercepted in either of the Panthers' two previous games, and had thrown one in the previous three games.
None of that matters now, though.
"I had a great text this morning from a Hall of Fame quarterback, and it was outstanding," Delhomme said. "It's something that they have been through and that's part of it. The sun will come up and you have to move on. You know it hurts. He had a great saying that every pick has its own story, and it surely does. But you just have to learn from it and go."
■ John Delong can be reached at jdelong@wsjournal.com.
Email
Print
ADVERTISEMENT
See community events or add your own! Click here!
Advertisement
