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CHARLOTTE -- Wednesday was just another day for Jake Delhomme.

It was just another day of ridicule from his teammates, questioning from the writers and television reporters and overanalyzing from talk-show hosts and their screaming callers.

He'd already heard most of it, starting on the long flight home from Oakland during which the Panthers voted him a game ball for being the Raiders' best defensive player. Carolina's quarterback endured it, came home from the 17-6 win with a sick feeling in his stomach and immersed himself in the film room where he watched the game tape.

Over and over and over again.

It's been a process, and not one good quarterbacks have to go through often. Of course, good quarterbacks don't often have games as bad as the one Delhomme had Sunday in Oakland. The numbers were bad, and the execution was terrible and the strain it put on the team was palpable. It's all the Panthers have been able to talk about for three days.

Sunday's flight home was bizarre. Monday was the first day of reckoning, and Tuesday he had to hear it from friends and family and neighbors. By the time the team gathered for the long Wednesday, the effective start of the work week, the franchise had come to terms with and had started to work its way out.

"Last week is over," wide receiver Steve Smith said. "I never look back."

Smith said he's just glad the team is 6-2. Told the team is actually 7-2, the star receiver looked stunned.

"Really?" he asked.

Delhomme is 49-30 as a starting quarterback since arriving in Carolina in 2003, more wins than only six other NFL quarterbacks in that span -- Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Brett Favre, Matt Hasselbeck, Donovan McNabb and Ben Roethlisberger. Only Manning and Favre have played without extended periods of injury, and only Brady has been to more than one Super Bowl in that time.

And not one of them has won a football game with a lower passer rating than Delhomme's staggering 12.3 Sunday.

"It was just one of those days," he said Wednesday as the team tried to put it to rest and move toward Sunday's game against winless Detroit.

Delhomme had been through bad games before, and he thought he knew how to alter the inevitable at halftime Sunday. He went back to his routines, mentally prepared for the first play, a play-action fake pass to one of three receivers, a bread-and-butter call designed for a quick gain and a quick fix to his struggles.

"If we have a play-action fake, you fake it, go through your reads, check the ball down," he said, going through the quarterback jargon of a routine play. "It didn't work."

Some of the problems had to do with Carolina having still another lineup of offensive linemen in front of Delhomme. Some of it had to do with the game plan of throwing an unusual number of screen passes at the Raiders.

Smith said nothing else seemed unusual.

"The huddles were normal," he said. "The same as every other huddle."

Defensive end Julius Peppers said everything looked normal from the sideline.

"We won the game," Peppers said. "That's what's important."

Coach John Fox said everything seemed to run smoothly in a rather simple game plan against one of the worst teams in the NFL.

"We had to play well enough to win, and we did," he said. "It just wasn't in all three phases."

The defense played so well that Peppers was named the league's defensive player of the week. The special teams had one of their best games of the year. Thus the 12.3 passer rating by Carolina's quarterback went without penalty.

It was not unnoticed by his teammates, however. Delhomme stood at his locker Wednesday and went through the litany of things he was supposed to say while backup quarterbacks Brett Basanez and Josh McCown chattered nearby like magpies, repeating everything he said. Peppers stood in the middle of the locker with another pack of people around him and revealed the story of the award ceremony on the flight home.

"He had a good day today," Peppers said after the Wednesday practice, patronizing the quarterback as he tried to keep from laughing. "It's easy to joke when you win. We can laugh about it now."

The underlying fear is that what happened Sunday will happen again this week. Or next week in Atlanta. Or in the playoffs. But the Panthers' way of dealing with it has been telling. Carolina has spun it and joked about it and studied it and put Delhomme through a four-day program that ended Wednesday with the entire team getting its last jabs in on the first day of the work week.

Wednesday was just another day in the process, another long day for Jake Delhomme.

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