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CHARLOTTE -- The phone rang on the sideline Sunday in the waning moments of Carolina's 34-0 drubbing of the Kansas City Chiefs. Muhsin Muhammad answered it then promptly handed the phone to Steve Smith.

"Here," Muhammad said. "It's for you."

Moments earlier, Smith had been slammed out of bounds by a Chiefs defender and wasn't feeling well at all. Eventually, he would get up, cover his head in a towel and lean into a trash can.

John Fox, standing a few feet away from his star receiver, pulled Jake Delhomme. The game was over. Only the reckoning remained. The nagging questions now, as Carolina heads into its first really big game, are about the health of a 4-1 football team.

The mounting injuries forced the Panthers to play without their starting tackles Sunday, and an ankle injury to center Ryan Kalil left Carolina without three starters on the offensive line as the game ended. Of course, by then, Fox was pulling starters as fast as he could get them off the field.

Smith, who caught six passes for 96 yards before leaving the game, shrugged as he walked to the sideline telephone. He listened to his coaches upstairs for a few seconds then said the only words the Panthers wanted to hear.

"I'm all right, man," he said.

And the season continued.

This was the easiest game of the season for the Panthers, one of the easiest in memory. Carolina rolled up 441 yards in offense, held the anemic Kansas City offense to 127 yards and no points, held AFC rushing leader Larry Johnson to two yards and sent much of the crowd of 72,319 home happy.

At halftime.

"It was fun, for the most part," Delhomme said. "We'll take it, and it's time to move on to Tampa."

They'll move on with several players injured and several more hurting. But five games into an NFL season, that's not unusual.

"You're always concerned with injuries," fullback Brad Hoover said. "That's how it works. We just don't want to have as many as we've had in the past. As seasons go on, there are going to be injuries, sometimes crucial injuries that cost us games. The main thing is we have to remain confident, and the guys who get the opportunities will either step up or step down, and that will make us or break us."

Carolina played on Sunday with guys stepping up all over the place, looking like a complete team in spite of the replacements along the offensive line. And only five games into the season, comparisons are being made to the 2003 team that made it to the Super Bowl. Delhomme listened to those comparisons for a while before pointing out the main differences. One, this is only five games into a season with the two biggest games looming.

"And in 2003, we had our starting five (offensive linemen) play together all but maybe a quarter the whole season," he said. "I think Jeff Mitchell missed one game. Other than that, they were together the whole time."

This is a deeper football team than the one that made it to Super Bowl XXXVIII, and it's certainly a deeper team than in 2005, when Carolina made it to the NFC Championship game before running completely out of tailbacks. The strength of this team so far has been the reserves, and with Smith missing two games due to suspension, two starters missing the Kansas City game and another injured along with wide receiver D.J. Hackett, the reserves are suddenly front and center.

If that was going through the mind of the coach as he watched his best player lying on the sideline in the fourth quarter of a 34-0 game Sunday, he wouldn't say. If that was the reason he wasted no time in getting Delhomme out of the game, he pretended not to know.

"That's part of football," he said about the play where Smith was driven out bounds and slammed to the ground.

Asked if Smith was hurt, Fox answered quickly.

"Nope," he said.

We'll take his word for it. Carolina now heads on the road to play division rival Tampa with as many as five offensive starters injured, give or take No. 89. The 1-4 Chiefs had nothing for the patched together Panthers. More than a thousand miles away, next week's opponent was having its own problems, having to replace starting quarterback Brian Griese with disgruntled former starter Jeff Garcia.

Injuries are part of the game in the NFL, but sometimes you get to play the Chiefs. Those were the only obvious lessons from a 34-0 drubbing that left other questions unanswered and had phones ringing in an emptying stadium five games into a long season.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com