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Need a one-stop shop to catch up on the top sports stories big and small? Time Out For Sports airs Mondays on WFAE's "All Things Considered" and has what you need to know about everything from Charlotte-area high school football highlights to the latest updates on the Carolina Panthers.

Panthers’ latest loss was ‘a five-alarm fire,’ Charlotte sportswriter says

Panthers quarterback Sam Darnold is seen during Sunday's game against the New England Patriots.
Chanelle Smith-Walker/Carolina Panthers/Twitter
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@Panthers
Panthers quarterback Sam Darnold is seen during Sunday's game against the New England Patriots.

The Carolina Panthers lost on Sunday, and that’s become something of a familiar headline.

The team is now 4-5 for the season after falling to New England. The Patriots won 24-6, and it was a bad night for quarterback Sam Darnold, who said he “didn’t play (his) best football” on Sunday.

“It was a five-alarm fire,” The Charlotte Observer’s Langston Wertz Jr. told WFAE “All Things Considered” host Gwendolyn Glenn on this week’s Time Out for Sports. “I mean, fans were leaving the stands. It was just hard to watch. It was like watching the varsity play the (junior varsity). In year two of (coach) Matt Rhule’s rebuild, the Panthers really seem to be regressing back to where they started.”

Not only that, but Carolina also lost center Matt Paradis, a key player, due to an injury in the game.

Things weren’t much better for the Charlotte Hornets over the last few games. They lost four in a row to the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Golden State Warriors, the Sacramento Kings and the L.A. Clippers and were set to face off against the L.A. Lakers on Monday night.

“Old issues are showing up again,” Wertz said. “They can’t rebound. They can’t defend on the interior, and it’s forcing them to scramble to try to gang rebound and protect the interior. But it’s allowing other teams to shoot 3 (pointers).”

It’s been an exciting few days on the college football scene, including when unbeaten Wake Forest lost to the UNC Tar Heels.

“The Tar Heel fans rushed the field after the game,” Wertz said. “It had to feel good for (coach) Mack Brown to get a win like that in a season like this.”

You can listen to the full conversation above. Here’s a quick look at some other things Glenn and Wertz talk about on this week’s Time Out for Sports.

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Gwendolyn is an award-winning journalist who has covered a broad range of stories on the local and national levels. Her experience includes producing on-air reports for National Public Radio and she worked full-time as a producer for NPR’s All Things Considered news program for five years. She worked for several years as an on-air contract reporter for CNN in Atlanta and worked in print as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun Media Group, The Washington Post and covered Congress and various federal agencies for the Daily Environment Report and Real Estate Finance Today. Glenn has won awards for her reports from the Maryland-DC-Delaware Press Association, SNA and the first-place radio award from the National Association of Black Journalists.