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CHARLOTTE - Some walk in muttering. Some walk in with an assistant coach attached to their leg. Some run straight to the bathroom. Some walk straight to a trainer's table.

No matter how you picture halftime of an NFL game, you're probably wrong. There rarely are any major changes made in game plans, almost never any rousing speeches. There's no time for film sessions or intricate reviews or even much time to rest.

An NFL halftime can be the most chaotic 15 minutes of the game.

"There's not enough time to do much of anything," Carolina Panthers coach John Fox said last year. "By the time you catch your breath, there's a knock on the door and it's time for the second half."

Halftime of an NFL season is different. And when the midpoint of the year comes with an off-week, as it did Sunday for the Panthers, a lot can happen. Coaches dissect every second of the first half of the season, go through the entire playbook to eliminate entire aspects of the team and sometimes make personnel decisions that alter careers.

Coaches are fired during bye weeks. Quarterbacks are replaced. Players are hauled into court. Brad Hoover went back to Cullowhee this weekend to be inducted into the Western Carolina athletics hall of fame. John Kasay signed a four-year contract extension.

Steve Smith, Jake Delhomme and Muhsin Muhammad all went home for Halloween. Fox, however, walked into a darkened room inside Bank of America Stadium and started watching film. Of the Panthers.

Carolina has eight more games before the playoffs, but Fox is far more concerned with his own team right now than the upcoming games against Oakland and Detroit. The self-scouting mode is typical of NFL coaches, but the truth is they rarely get the chance to do it.

"As coaches, we go through and self-scout and see statistically where we are in a lot of different ways," Fox said.

The master of this process was Dom Capers, the original Carolina coach, who actually lived in the stadium and spent hours looking at tape and stats, searching for tendencies within his own team. He also was the most stubborn of coaches when it came to making changes.

His most famous cliché was about losing: "You have to have the courage to lose doing what you do best."

Carolina runs the ball efficiently with two backs running behind a revolving offensive line and Hoover. Nothing in the first half of the season suggests that will change. The ball-control Panthers will run on any down as long as they're not behind.

The most glaring tendency throughout Fox's tenure has been the willingness to abandon the run once Carolina falls behind. With Smith on the team, who could blame him? But the fact is, until this season, the Panthers rarely made comebacks and often became pass-happy during the second half in games they were trailing.

Carolina came back to win from a 17-point deficit against Jacksonville in 2003 and San Francisco in 2004, and only once did the Panthers come back from a 14-point deficit - in 1995 against Atlanta. Already this season, Carolina has done it twice - against Chicago in Week 2 and last week against Arizona. The 6-2 Panthers have trailed in five games this year, coming back to win all but the debacles at Minnesota and Tampa Bay.

Last week, when the players headed into the locker room at halftime down 10-3, they were in a surly mood.
"It was, 'Oh, no. Here we go again,' " offensive tackle Jordan Gross said.

Hoover said the scene inside, however, was controlled chaos. Position coaches were yelling at their own players, some of whom were getting treatment, others trying to find solitude in the bathroom or their own locker, and Fox was huddled with assistants trying to come up with something to erase a deficit that would grow to 14 points in the third quarter. By the end of the session there was only one real decision.

"We just needed a play," Hoover said. "It's not a cliché, as much as you think."

So go the halftime adjustments. Carolina promptly went out and gave up a touchdown to fall behind 17-3. But that's when things began to change. Carolina went to the run, and six plays later the Panthers scored on a DeAngelo Williams 15-yard carry that changed the game.

"We just needed to make a play," Williams said.
Carolina has outscored its opponents 82-20 at hom
e in the second half this season, some of it by coaching decisions some of it by players making plays. Delhomme said it would be wrong to put too much emphasis on anything when figuring out why Carolina is able to come back this season and was not in past seasons. Last week, he said the players were just mad at themselves. And the coaches were mad at the players, and the crazy halftime showed it.

Fox sent his team home after Wednesday's practice with one word of advice: Rest. Then he walked into the stadium and went to work. He said it's not rocket science, and the team he will get back today won't be any different than the one he saw last week.

"It's like when we come out after halftime in a game," he said. "There's still a lot left, and the second half is just as important as the first half. We stay along the same lines."

Sometimes the best halftime adjustments are the ones you never make.

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