With Super Bowl LX in the books, it’s time to look forward to the long offseason of 2026. The Carolina Panthers are not widely expected to repeat their moderate successes of the 2025 season. Bryce Young
has not firmly and obviously established himself as “the answer,” even as the team is preparing to offer him a contract extension in the form of exercising his fifth year option. This is usually the time of year when I have to preach patience to fellow Panthers fans. There are weeks to go before we get to the start of Free Agency, weeks more until the NFL Draft, and then months before the start of training camp and the preseason.
Most offseasons are a dreary combination of not trusting the decision makers in Bank of America Stadium and not being able to do anything about it because the vast majority of our readership and commenters are not David Tepper, Dan Morgan, or Dave Canales. I think. This season, despite still not having any actual control over the movements and strategies of our favorite team, I think we can safely say that the Morgan, Canales, and even Tepper have earned a modicum of trust.
Draftin’ Dan
In two short seasons with limited cap space and draft capital, Morgan has built a roster that is undeniably better than the mess Scott Fitterer and Matt Rhule left behind. He’s only had one season with his new scouting department, but already last year’s draft class looks to be an all-timer for the Panthers in terms of contributing rookies. Offensive Rookie of the Year Tetiaroa McMillan was an obvious hit, but the bigger win might have been finding longer term pieces of the wider puzzle in linebackers Nic Scourton and Princely Umanmielen, running back Trevor Étienne, and safety Lathan Ransom. The jury is still on defensive tackle Cam Jackson, fan favorite tight end Mitchell Evans, and wide receiver Jimmy Horn Jr. but that’s to be expected for players selected 140th overall and later.
The impressive thing is that all eight draft picks made the roster and stayed on it all the way through the season. A couple more offseasons like that and the Panthers can spend fewer free agency dollars on veteran stopgaps and more on actual upgrades while also retaining some of their own draft talent. Maybe they’ll even flip back on to the right side of the all-important compensatory draft picks formula.
The optimist bully came through
Canales, for his part, has lived up to his billing. That’s more than you can say for Tepper’s last two hires at head coach. The Panthers have come a long, long way since benching Young after Week 2 of the 2024 season. A 2025 wildcard berth and a respectable performance in their loss to the Los Angeles Rams was proof that Canales can pull together a team and inspire them to be greater than the sum of their parts. That is a valuable skill to have and arguably one more important over the course of an entire season than any particular talent in play-calling.
Whether or not Canales should ultimately hand off his play-calling duties or whether he can improve those skills with time remains to be seen. He has a lot to learn, he is young, and he is still hobbled by not knowing which version of Young is going to show up on a given day. That’s a lot of balls up in the air, but Canales has managed to put on two reasonably good shows with those balls in just two seasons. I think he has earned a fair amount of credit to keep juggling them for a few more season.
What’s next?
There is a lot to be worried about still, to be certain. The Carolina Panthers have a Bryce Young-sized ice berg in their waters and there really is no telling yet what they should do about it, let alone what they ultimately will do. Still, the bag is more mixed than bad. Their schedule is going to be rough next season, they have a moderate amount of cap space, and they have mostly their original draft picks. That is to say, they are working with about what the rest of the league is working with while trying to improve for 2026.
If Dan Morgan can keep finding better pieces to build the roster with and if Dave Canales can continue to produce a team that is better than the individual pieces on the roster then I think the Panthers have a great shot at not being embarrassing in 2026. Heck, they may even have a shot at being good. I don’t know about you, but that feels way better than where the team has been over the past five to ten years.
