This morning, every Amber Alert board in Charlotte should read: “Missing: NFL Team. If spotted, please contact PSL owners immediately.”

The poor performance by the Panthers in their 20-7 loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers is unacceptable. I am a diehard fan, and I look hard for something positive in every game. But yesterday the glass was half-empty, and so was the entire team, coaching staff included.

To paraphrase that great African-American poet, Richard T. Pryor: “How long, how long, will this B.S. go on?”

There is a mess on Mint Street, and it’s time to fix it! And the fix starts with the coaching staff.

Let’s go back to Jake Delhomme’s horrible play at quarterback last year. Was it really his fault or the fault of the person who made the executive decision to continue to start him game after game, regardless of his diminished ability and excessive interceptions?

For good or bad, it is John Fox and his coaching staff who make game-day decisions. And lately, their decisions have mostly been bad.

Case in point: On a third-and-eight play Sunday just before halftime, the Panthers came out of the huddle with a two-receiver set formation. This is an obvious pass situation, so any good offensive coordinator would use a minimum of three receivers, but hopefully four or five. The Panthers coaching staff either does not know this bit of football basics or they don’t have the appropriate core of receivers to get the job done.

The result, by the way, was an incomplete pass and a punt.

It is the coaching staff’s responsibility to evaluate the team’s needs, to get the right players in the right positions, either by draft, free agency, trade or development. If this had been done, we would have more than one valid receiver (Steve Smith) on the field year after year.

Why did we not get Anquan Boldin, Patrick Clayton, or T.J. Houshmandzadeh?

John Fox has said during his entire tenure with the Panthers that he likes a run-first offense, yet in two consecutive games this year his run-to-pass ratio has been 50-50.

That would be fine if we had an offensive line that could protect a novice quarterback and more than one receiver (Steve Smith) running routes. John Fox was a defensive coordinator for the Giants prior to becoming the Panthers’ head coach, yet the defensive secondary gets burned week after week, and the defensive front rarely puts pressure on the quarterback. They allowed Josh Freeman of Tampa Bay to look like a Pro-Bowl-caliber quarterback, and we all know that at this point in his career he is far from that.

Some may not agree with me, but numbers don’t lie. Look at the stats and you’d think we played Cincinnati… oops; that’s next week’s loss.

John Fox is a good man by all accounts, but to continue to do the same thing week after week and expect a different result is the definition of insanity. It is time for Fox to fly over the coo-coo’s nest and for someone else to take over the reins before this season is a complete waste.

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