The media is having a field day with the fact that the Carolina Panthers have meekly creeped into the playoffs and of all the predictions and pundit commentary I have seen there have been precisely zero people that are predicting they will make it out of the first round. This bodes well for the Los Angeles Rams, as many predictors have them making it all the way to the Super Bowl, and many of those have them winning the entire thing.
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this is how I imagine almost every snap turning out for the Panthers
There are Vegas odds for almost anything you can imagine but it is quite popular to bet on who is going to win the entire thing right now and while some teams have small incentives such as Seattle being +375 and the Rams being +425 on the betting lines, a bet on Carolina to win the Super Bowl is standing at an unprecidented +20,000. The next "least likely to win" team is the LA Chargers, and their betting odds are at +3000
In case you don't understand what the +/- business means, it is based on a $1000 bet, meaning that if you bet $1000 on Seattle to win and they do so you would win $1375, if you bet on Carolina to win and they did so, you would win $21,000. Basically everyone knows that Carolina stands zero chance of winning, but the commentary get more funny when you dig into it a bit more.
This is what the brackets look like and it isn't a cut and dry as moving from left to right or right to left in a straight trajectory upon victory. That is actually a very complicated affair and something I may or may not attempt to explain at a later date. The NFL brackets system is a tough one to wrap your head around and I don't even fully understand it myself. I do know that if you are in the AFC you won't play an NFC team unless you both make it to the Superbowl, and early predictions have Seattle and New England being in that position.
Strange things can happen though and they normally do. Other than Carolina and perhaps Pittburgh though, the experts are stating that basically any team can make it to the end. Not the Panthers though. When people talk about them they tend to just laugh and say something like "I can't believe a team this bad is in the playoffs and ranked 4th."
One guy stated "if by some miracle the Panthers made it to the Superbowl, they would be the weakest team to make it there, ever."
The Panthers have a -69 point differential, meaning that they have had 69 more points scored against them than they have scored themselves. This is the 4th worst record of that sort of all time. Keeping in mind that the NFL has existed for 105 years, this is a pretty horrible statistic.
What makes this all more amusing is that the Panthers are the ONLY team in the history of the NFL to make it into the playoffs TWICE with a losing record.
I'll leave you with one more piece of very interesting coincidence: The Panthers are not considered to be the worst team to ever make the playoffs. That honor goes to the 2010 Seahawks. That team had a offensive coach named Dave Canales who was a newcomer on the coaching scene that showed a lot of promise.
Dave Canales is currently the head coach of the Carolina Panthers.