When your NFL team kind of sucks

It happens to any team at some point. People are raving about how the 49ers are going to win this year but they too went through a very dry spell of mediocrity for about a decade. Now let's look at the sorry state of my team, the Carolina Panthers.

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Being a Panthers fan was easy right from the start in 1995. Their first season they had a record of 7-9 and this was the best that any expansion team has ever done since the beginning of time! The following year they went an amazing 12-4 and were only eliminated from the playoffs by the Packers, who went on to win the Super Bowl.

But then, the dark ages began.

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The Panthers wouldn't have a winning season, or reach the playoffs again for another 9 years and things began to have a roller-coaster effect. Despite having similar or even exactly the same player depth, one season the Panthers would go 12-4 and the next 7-9. Then the year to finally win it all was 2015 where it appeared a foregone conclusion that the undefeated Carolina Panthers, who cleaned the floor with all their opponents including in the playoffs, were going to destroy the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl 50.

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The Panthers that took the field in Super Bowl 50 seemed like a different team than we had seen all season. They made mistake after mistake and turned the ball over so many times that it simply wasn't possible to win. The Broncos would defeat the Panthers (who were a near 10 point favorite on Vegas lines) 24-10.

The following year, with again, nearly the exact same team, the Panthers finished the season 6-10, in 2018 they started the season 6-2 (hooray!" and finished it 7-9. In 2019 the same phenomenon happened with the season starting strong at 5-3 and then Carolina dropped the NEXT 8 damn games to finish at 5-11.

The new owners had seen enough at this point and fired the head coach. Next year we picked up a college football coach (which is a strange move in my opinion) in Matt Rhule who is the former head coach of Baylor University and Temple U prior to that.

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When Rhule was announced as the new Head Coach most of us had the same "huh?" expression on our face that Matt Rhule has on his own face here.
The prevailing opinion of Carolina fans at the moment is not a optimistic one. We have gotten used to disappointment to the point that we are starting to feel like an Ohio franchise at this point (ok, maybe not that bad.)

I think that being a Panthers fan is a unique one because we were good, there were times that we appeared to be dominant in the league, but Carolina just can't seem to maintain any level of consistency and all of us are just presuming that the new coach isn't going to make any difference. I hope Rhule can prove us all wrong.

Does your team suck? I know all teams suck at one point or another (even the Patriots) but I feel that Carolina is unique in the way that they continually trick us into thinking they are gonna be great, and then fail to do so.