The Carolina Panthers have had two big problems in their first two seasons under head coach Dave Canales. They have had notoriously slow starts and remarkably shallow rosters. The roster was largely an inherited problem, attributable largely to a decade of poor drafting. In a way, that has also led to the poor starts as one has to imagine the coaches spending all of their energy trying to field a competitive team with athletes that wouldn’t have made their way onto another roster.
The 3-1 start from
this preseason is a sign that things may be changing. Sure, the starters still looked a few gears behind in the race compared to the competition, but the depth was finally at least equal to—and often better—than their counterparts on the other sideline. That led us to ask y’all last week if you felt better, the same, or worse about the 2026 Carolina Panthers after watching them find success in the preseason.
As it turns out, most of y’all have seen too many flashes in the pan and ultimately false promises to believe anything from this team before they have shown who they are in the regular season. That’s fair. The Panthers have not been a team to reward faith for a long, long time. It is an honest, sad sign of how far we’ve come that a majority of fans didn’t find a way to look at this relatively successful preseason and feel worse about the team.
I’ll leave you with this one thought. This is the best roster that Canales has fielded in his going on three seasons. He has improved each year thus far. The relative health and quality of some of the starters still implies, to me, a slow start to the season. The hope for this year lies in a stronger finish thanks to increased quality in the depth and the fact that Canales’ teams have tended to get better towards the end of the season.
Last season, the Panthers needed one extra win against either the Tampa Bay Buccaneers or the New Orleans Saints, both teams with losing records, in the last four weeks of the 2025 season to clinch their first playoff trip in a decade. Instead, they ran out of gas and limped into the postseason (hooray, and such) with a losing record and a giant, divisional asterisk. They put on a good show against the Los Angeles Rams, against whom they apparently match up well, but they were clearly overmatched and outgunned down the stretch. A higher talent floor could easily make the difference this year.
Sign up, scroll down, and sound off to share your opinion.
Join the conversation!
Sign up for a user account and get:
- Fewer ads
- Create community posts
- Comment on articles, community posts
- Rec comments, community posts
- New, improved notifications system!
Download the SB Nation app on iOS or Android.
Checkout FanDuel, the official sportsbook partner of SB Nation.
