GREEN BAY, Wis. — When it was over — after rookie Ryan Fitzgerald conquered the Lambeau Field winds and silenced a crowd of nearly 78,000 with his second game-winning kick in four weeks — the Carolina Panthers dared to dream.
If the Panthers could come into Lambeau as two-touchdown underdogs and take down one of the NFC’s best teams in one of the NFL’s most storied stadiums, it’s fair to wonder whether they might be arriving as a playoff contender a year earlier than what most in the organization viewed as a three-year rebuild.
Fitzgerald’s 49-yard field goal as time expired stunned the Green Bay Packers 16-13 on Sunday to give Dave Canales his biggest win since he arrived in 2024 at the same time Dan Morgan was promoted to general manager.
The Panthers (5-4) are above .500 through nine games for the first time since 2019. Coincidentally, they arrived at that record six years ago with a Week 10 defeat at Green Bay, the start of a season-ending, eight-game losing streak that cost Ron Rivera his job.
These Panthers are trending in a better direction than the 2019 team, which finished the year with Kyle Allen and Will Grier starting games at quarterback and Perry Fewell stepping in as interim coach.
The Panthers still have only a 17 percent to make the playoffs (up from 8 percent last week), according to The Athletic’s playoff simulator. But they’ve matched last season’s win total with eight games remaining — all against NFC teams. That includes four games versus teams that entered Sunday leading their division or tied for first.
“We got NFC opponents for the rest of the season,” running back Rico Dowdle said. “So a win like this definitely matters and helps us build towards where we want to be at the end of the season.”
Before the Panthers began their run of four playoff appearances in five years under Rivera, they had to get by the class of the NFC — first San Francisco and later Seattle. Canales, an assistant for Pete Carroll with those Seahawks teams, understood the importance of Sunday’s win.
“It’s huge. … To get into this type of environment, this is a special place. The fans are unbelievable and this is a really good team,” he said. “We understood what it was gonna take for us to win this game was doing right longer. That’s our mentality and that’s also the thing we have to capture. Can we capture this style of football? It didn’t show up for last week. It showed up for us today.”
After the Panthers were blown out by Buffalo 40-9 last week, no one gave them much of a chance against the Packers (5-2-1), including the sportsbooks. The Panthers opened as 11-point underdogs and the line had climbed to 13.5 points by Sunday, even with Bryce Young returning from an ankle injury. Carolina is just the second team since 1970 to have a winning record through nine games while being the underdog in each of their games, according to CBS Sports Research.
When right guard Chandler Zavala false-started on the first offensive play, then left during the second series with an elbow injury and didn’t return, it was not hard to envision Micah Parsons and Rashan Gary running roughshod an offensive line being held together by Ace bandages and packing tape.
But Canales scrapped the two-tailback approach, leaned into Dowdle’s tough running style and counted on Ejiro Evero’s defense to limit Packers quarterback Jordan Love, who tied a franchise record with 20 consecutive completions in a 35-25 win over Pittsburgh last week.
It worked.
With Chuba Hubbard limited to five carries, Dowdle powered his way to 130 yards and two touchdowns on 25 carries. It was Dowdle’s third game with 20-plus rushing attempts, and the Panthers have won all three.
“That’s the player he is. That’s the guy he is,” Young said. “Everyone sees Sunday. But how hard he works, the intensity he has, the intentionality he has during practice, you see him being more and more comfortable. He’s been really vocal about what he wants.”
Rico Dowdle had his third 100-yard game of the season Sunday against the Packers and now has a career-high four rushing TDs. (Dan Powers / Imagn Images)
Meanwhile, the defense bent but didn’t break against Love, who completed 26-of-37 passes for 273 yards but had no touchdowns and threw an ugly interception. The Packers drove inside the Panthers’ 20 on five of their seven possessions, but managed just one touchdown.
Love lost two of his three leading receivers when tight end Tyler Kraft and wideout Matthew Golden were injured. But the Packers finally broke through with a Josh Jacobs’ 1-yard touchdown run to tie it at 13 with 2:32 remaining.
That’s when Young entered the chat.
“That’s a really good team on the other side,” he said. “Our defense balled the entire game. But we knew at some point we’re gonna have to go win it.”
Taking over at the Carolina 29, Young moved the Panthers to midfield with completions to Jalen Coker and Tetairoa McMillan. An incompletion brought up a second-and-10, and gave Young a chance to make a play with his brain.
Just before taking the shotgun snap, Young said something to Dowdle while pointing to a Packers’ linebacker. The idea was to make Green Bay think Dowdle was staying in to protect. Instead, Dowdle took the handoff and bolted for a 19-yard gain to set up Fitzgerald’s walk-off.
A week after Shaq Thompson sniffed out a tunnel screen that resulted in the Bills intercepting Andy Dalton, Young tried to deke the Packers with some pre-snap deception.
“He was acting like he was putting me in protection, just to kind of play mind games with the defense. But he was just telling me, ‘It’s still the same play,’” Dowdle said. “I think things like that definitely make a huge difference because you never know what the defense is thinking. So they’ve definitely gotta adjust.”
Dowdle’s run made up for an unsportsmanlike penalty following his 1-yard TD in the third quarter. Dowdle celebrated with, umm, two pelvic thrusts that were a nod to a Key & Peele skit in which the football player Hingle McCringleberry is penalized for doing three thrusts.
“From my understanding and everything I’ve learned — we go over stuff like this every week in the meeting room — I definitely think you’re supposed to get two pumps,” Dowdle said. “Hopefully I don’t get a fine.”
Dowdle’s exuberance forced Fitzgerald to try a 48-yard extra point into the wind, which fell well short. Before the game, Panthers special teams coordinator Tracy Smith noticed the winds — gusting up to 30 mph — were strongest at the end of the field opposite the stadium’s lone tunnel. He told Canales if the Panthers won the coin toss and received the opening kickoff, they would have their wind to their back in the fourth quarter.
“I’ve gotta give a lot of props to Tracy Smith. He and I were talking before the game and he was like, ‘If we take the ball, we can set ourselves up to have the ball with the wind to our back to finish the game to give us an opportunity,’” Canales said. “And it played out just like that.”
After two Dowdle runs failed to gain a yard, Fitzgerald trotted out for the potential game-winner. Green Bay coach Matt LeFleur called a timeout to try to ice Fitzgerald, but the undrafted free agent from Florida State sent the kick through the uprights and sent the Packers’ faithful to the exits in a foul mood.
“That’s always fun. Like in college on road games where we played at Clemson or Florida, you make a big kick and the crowd goes from so loud to just nothing,” he said. “It’s a cool feeling for sure.”
As Canales suggested, the Panthers need to bottle these feelings over the second half of the season, which starts with a home game next week against the hapless New Orleans Saints. Tougher tests await against San Francisco, Seattle, the Los Angeles Rams and Tampa Bay.
But after pulling off one of the biggest upsets in team history, suddenly anything seems possible. Young, whose 102 passing yards were the third-fewest of his career (and lowest total in a win), wasn’t interested in discussing what Sunday’s win meant.
When asked if the Panthers might look back at the game later as a pivotal point in the Canales/Young era, the third-year QB smiled and said, “I guess we’ll have to see.”