They still have to play the game and while I'm not a huge fan of betting a team that won in the regular season, but the Panthers certainly gained a ton of confidence in Seattle when they had their 4th quarter come back off back to back 80 yard TD drives to win the game. TD drives is the key here, because Carolina is one of the best in the red zone at 72% TD rate at home. The other thing to note is Cam Newton threw 2 INT's in that game, and Seattle had Jimmy Graham who caught 8 receptions for 140 yards and they still lost. No Jimmy Graham this time, and the running game of Seattle is struggling so it's going to be on the shoulders of Russell Wilson. Let's also not discount the travel that Seattle has had to under take this last week going out to Minnesota, back to Seattle, and now back to Carolina to play a 1pm game.
You could make an argument that Seattle has the better defense, but I would hesitate to agree. When you look at what they did down the stretch hey held Minnesota to 7 and 10 points, Baltimore without Flaco to 6, Cleveland to 13, and Arizona who had zero incentive to play to 6 points, and they gave up 23 points to the Rams offense at home in a loss. I think Seattle's defense is very good, but they haven't really faced many top offenses. They faced Arizona/Pittsburgh the two top YPP offenses and both scored over 30 points on them when it mattered. The Bengals were 9th and put up 27 on Seattle, and Carolina is 12th and put up 27 on the Seahawks. So the Seahawks defense played only 5 games against top 12 offenses in the league and when you take out Arizona in week 17 because they were seriously not interested in showing anything, they allowed an average of 30.75 points per game.
Carolina's defense faced the following top 12 offenses: New Orleans - 22 points allowed, Tampa 23, Seattle 23, Washington 16, New Orleans 38, Atlanta 0, Giants 35, Atlanta 20, Tampa 10. To summarize they faced 9 teams in the top 12 in yards per play offense and allowed 20.78 points per game. The Panthers gave up some big numbers late and I feel those were due to injuries. I expect this team to be a lot healthier and it also pays to play at home where they are #1 in yards per point.
I expect this game to be close in the first half with low scoring, but we have seen these defenses loosen up quite a bit in the 4th quarter of games. I would expect if this game is close at the half for the total to go over in the second half. Also something to look at as you feel this game out.
