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CHARLOTTE -- Fresh from a week off and extra time at home, the Carolina Panthers are preparing for a long, strange road trip and hoping to avoid the big pothole that is Oakland.

The franchise, not the city.

Carolina will leave Friday for the long flight west to play the first of five away games left on the schedule. The 6-2 Panthers have only three home games remaining, only one this month.

And for the third game all year, they'll have their starting five offensive linemen together. For how long is anyone's guess. The group actually has been on the field together for all of a quarter and half since training camp.

On the surface, this looks like a good thing, but several Carolina players admitted Wednesday's practice was hardly crisp.

"It's going to take some time to get back on the same page with each other," right guard Keydrick Vincent said. "They have to get back into game shape."

He was talking specifically about rookie tackle Jeff Otah and center Ryan Kalil, who had missed the last two games, but he could've been talking about any of the linemen. Vincent, an offseason acquisition, is the only offensive lineman to have played all eight regular-season games.

So once again, Carolina heads into a game with questions about the line despite the fact that all five starters will play for the first time since the Atlanta game in late October, which was the first time since the opener they'd all been on the field as a unit.

That turns what would typically be a game in which Carolina would be a prohibitive favorite into a potential trap game. Oakland, of course, is playing into the scenario by sending signals of an imminent team disaster having already fired its coach midseason and announcing Wednesday that former Pro Bowl cornerback DeAngelo Hall, in his first season with the team, had been waived after eight games and $8 million in salary.

A year ago -- and for the past few seasons, for that matter -- the Panther have managed to leave their own troubles at home, winning eight of 10 away games during one stretch despite winning only five of 16 home games over the previous two seasons. The players and coaches struggled to explain that, even after the season-opening win at San Diego that suggested another season of road success.

Since then, of course, Carolina has lost its only two away games, falling clumsily to Minnesota and Tampa Bay. With so many road games left, and with so many personnel problems still facing them (rookie running back Jonathan Stewart missed Wednesday's practice with an unspecified heel injury), the Panthers know this week's trip to Oakland could be dangerous.

All trips to play the Raiders take on odd circumstance, not because of the weirdness of the Oakland organization these days or the weirdness of the Oakland fans in general, but because of the whole process of getting ready to play the Raiders. First, the flight is among the longest any team in the NFL has to make. The necessary walk-through practices on Saturdays are held at Stanford University's stadium some 45 minutes from Oakland's McAfee Coliseum.

A memo was posted above every Panthers player's locker Wednesday reminding them they would be wearing old-style cleats with seven five-eighths- to three-quarter-inch long studs for extra traction on the league's softest and soggiest field. In front of every player's locker was a pile of shoes, some in unopened boxes.

The players will be getting used to the cleats in the coming days, trying not to take a misstep before the long trip while waiting out the strange absence of Stewart and watching the team's starting offensive linemen get reacquainted.

"We've got a long road ahead," quarterback Jake Delhomme said. "It was nice having Kalil and Otah back. They looked pretty good. It'll be nice having the starting five out there again. We've invested a lot of time and work in the offseason with those guys."

Vincent said the first day back from the off-week left a lot to be desired. Otah said he felt like he was starting over in a sense.

"It felt good to be out there, but it took a little while for me to get the mojo," he said. "About the time I got hurt I'd just started to get the hang of everything."

The mojo for the Panthers in recent years has always been somewhere other than here. But now Carolina has to leave the comforts of home and head to Oakland while realigning the offensive line yet again and trying not to get overconfident about playing a strange 2-6 football team on a strange field in one of the league's strangest cities.

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