The Carolina Panthers are in as good a shape as possible to make a run to the Super Bowl, and I believe that is exactly where they are going.

The Panthers are playing as well as any team in the league over the last six weeks, they are relatively healthy, and I am a big believer that they will benefit greatly from having to play in a competitive Week 17 game before receiving a first-round bye.

The experience of Sunday's 33-31 win at New Orleans — a game that saw Carolina lose a 30-10 lead before marching back downfield for the game-winning field goal with one second left — is great for any team that now has two weeks off before hosting a divisional round game.

The Panthers got their offensive line banged up on Sunday, but if they can get Jeff Otah and Geoff Hangartner back, Carolina will be in great shape. Philadelphia being the No. 6 seed also plays into the Panthers' favor; Carolina could end up hosting Atlanta, Arizona or Minnesota two weeks from now, while the top-seeded New York Giants would have to contend with an Eagles team that is very dangerous.

• I gave an incorrect statistic last week when I wrote that Brett Favre had thrown nine interceptions in his last four games. He had thrown one touchdown and six interceptions, but he threw three more passes to the wrong team on Sunday, giving him two TDs and nine picks in the final five games of the season.

Favre's killer interceptions (one returned for a touchdown, and another with the Jets down seven and inside the Miami 30-yard line) hurt New York badly in a season-ending 24-17 loss to the Dolphins. Favre led all of football with 22 picks in 2008, while Chad Pennington, the man the Jets cut to make room for Favre, led the Fins to an 11-5 record and the franchise's first AFC East title since 2000.

Here's the biggest number to look out for with Favre: How long does the sure-fire Hall of Famer — how many weeks or months — keep the Jets waiting on his decision to play or retire from the NFL? New York is not Green Bay, and the Jets should never allow Favre to play the team the way he felt entitled to playing the Packers after 16 years there.

• The Pittsburgh Steelers allowed 237.2 yards per game this season, giving them the top-ranked defense in the NFL in 2008. Pittsburgh has now finished as the No. 1 defense in pro football four times this decade.

The great Steelers teams of the 1970s — featuring the Steel Curtain defense — only finished first on that side of the ball twice in that decade.

How good is current Pittsburgh defensive coordinator Dick LeBeau? LeBeau has kept the Steelers' defense at the top through two coaching regimes and lots of roster turnover.

• When Tom Brady tore the MCL and ACL in his left knee 15 minutes into the first game of the season, I told people I thought Matt Cassel — who hadn't started since high school after backing up Brady at New England, and Matt Leinart and Carson Palmer at Southern California — would lead the Patriots to a nine or 10-win season and a playoff berth.

Cassel had been sitting and watching Brady for four years, and the Patriots scouting and personnel department is simply too strong to have a backup in place that long who could not play.

Cassel had a terrific year, earning himself millions of dollars in his upcoming free agency by leading the Patriots to an 11-5 record. Amazingly, New England will miss the postseason, while the 8-8 San Diego Chargers — champions of the weak AFC West — get to go.

The Patriots have a huge decision to make with Cassel, namely because Brady's surgically-repaired knee is not healing properly. If Cassel signs with another team, and Brady needs another surgery, costing him the entire 2009 season, where will that leave the Patriots?

• The Dallas Cowboys have absolutely no character. The team many had pegged to represent the NFC in the Super Bowl proved that with a 44-6 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday. A win would have earned Dallas (9-7) the final wild card berth in the NFC, but the Boys will miss the postseason for the first time in three years after finishing 1-3 in December.

The Cowboys are coached by a jovial old soul named Wade Phillips. Phillips is a players' coach. He's soft on the players, running a soft training camp and readily making excuses for his guys after fortunate wins over the Cincinnati Bengals (4-11-1) and 34-14 beatings at the hands of the 2-14 St. Louis Rams.

Owner Jerry Jones has already stated that Phillips will be back for a third season in Dallas. Jones likes Phillips because he's no Jimmy Johnson and he's no Bill Parcells — meaning the owner is free to make decisions in the war room on draft day and basically meddle in the day-to-day operations of the Cowboys in ways stronger-minded men like Johnson and Parcells would never allow.

Jones makes excuses for the players also. The most talented roster in all of football — that's the way many analysts describe the Cowboys. Dallas had an NFL record 13 Pro Bowlers last year, but from the bottom to the top, there is no one in that organization to hold the players accountable.

• Dallas quarterback Tony Romo has officially become a late-season choke artist. Romo plays on a level similar to that of Tom Brady, Peyton Manning or Drew Brees for the first three months of the season, then he fades away when the games increase exponentially in importance. He's done it three straight years now, and, he spent most of his post-game news conference on Sunday throwing offensive coordinator Jason Garrett under the bus.

Romo may eventually make the Cowboys wish they had taken Brady Quinn with the 22nd overall pick of the 2006 draft, instead of trading the pick to the Cleveland Browns. If he plays poorly down the stretch in 2009, it's hard to imagine Terrell Owens not chewing Romo up and spitting him out, just like he did Jeff Garcia in San Francisco and Donovan McNabb in Philadelphia.



• Wherever Bill Parcells goes, winning is sure to follow. Parcells, in his first year on the job as vice president of football operations in Miami, is the man behind the Dolphins' turnaround from a 1-15 record to an 11-5 mark in 2008.

Parcells took little-known Tony Sparano from Dallas and made him Miami's head coach, he made the Dolphins bigger and more physical through the draft and he made a series of shrewd, under-the-radar signings (the biggest of those being Chad Pennington), picking up several of his former players from Dallas (a Parcells trademark) along the way.

Parcells turned the Giants, Patriots, Jets and Cowboys around as a head coach, and this time, he's doing it as an executive.

When Parcells got to Dallas in 2003, the first thing he said upon his hiring was that he was too old to deal with thugs (Adam “Pacman” Jones) and troublemakers (Terrell Owens). He opposed Jerry Jones on the T.O. signing, and he left after one year of coaching the mercurial wideout he referred to simply as "the player."

Parcells also wrote down a list of 10 commandments of being an NFL quarterback, a list he tried to drill into the head of Tony Romo when he became the team's starting quarterback early in Parcells' last season in Dallas. Not becoming a celebrity QB and taking care of the football at all costs were at least two of the commandments Romo has totally ignored since Parcells left.

The exact things that Parcells grumbled about and fought to prevent during his days in Dallas are the exact things that are haunting the Cowboys right now.

• North Carolina junior wide receiver Hakeem Nicks played his way right out of a Tar Heel uniform in Saturday's 31-30 loss to West Virginia in the Meineke Car Care Bowl in Nicks' hometown of Charlotte.

Nicks, a product of Independence High School, caught eight passes for 217 yards and three touchdowns, including a behind-the-back catch in the second half that might have been the niftiest of the 2008 college football season thus far.

The performance will almost assuredly catapult Nicks into the first round of next spring's NFL Draft, so he has most likely played his final game for UNC. Nicks was widely considered a late-first or early-second-round pick going into the game.

Michael Gilliland is sports editor of The Laurinburg Exchange. Write to him at mgilliland@laurinburgexchange.com