There is no sugar coating how much yesterday’s 26-10 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars sucked. The Carolina Panthers have been going downhill for about the past eight years and a season opening stinker is all too familiar. The defense looking lost on the field is too familiar. Bryce Young struggling in a season opener? Yup, we’ve seen that a few too many times. It’s the familiarity of this kind of bad, the frequency with which we’ve seen it, that hurts the most. It took all that optimism we had coming
into the season and soured it with a nauseating quickness. That said, I’m not ready to burn everything down yet. There were some differences to yesterday’s dysfunction that give me hope.
The Bad
Hot take, I don’t think Bryce Young was a awful yesterday. He had some bad throws, some bad decisions, and some bad luck. He needs to learn to live for the next set of downs and to slide, certainly. He isn’t Cam Newton and he’s trying to play like him sometimes. He also had some good throws that were dropped or carried inexplicably out of bounds.
People had their pitchforks out in the open threads for Bryce Young after his first incompletion. His first interception raised the temperature of those forks dramatically. Yes, he did make mistakes. No, he wasn’t as bad as the hapless, disaffected shell of a player he was when he opened the 2024 season. He also wasn’t the smooth operator who led the Panthers down the homestretch of the 2025 season. He fell somewhere in the middle.
There’s room for optimism there if you want it, but it is far from a free pass for Young. He needs to show he can step up without being benched for five weeks. It would also be an indictment of him as a player if he were the only player making costly errors. Alas, this was a team effort.
Xavier Legette was so focused on his hands for most of the game that he never gave a thought for his feet. Austin Corbett ruined at least three drives with bad snaps that threw off a play’s timing in a heavily timing based offense. Ja’Tavion Sanders dropped a beautiful ball down the seam. Yosh Nijman is no Ikem Ekwonu.
Some of these mistakes and more might be indications of players not being starter quality. A lot of them reek of them being unprepared. The argument that the starters should have had more time playing in the preseason is gaining weight, as the inconsistency and lack of cohesion from the team falls back at the feet of Dave Canales. He may be a good offensive coordinator, but he is still taking some lumps as a head coach. Whether or not those become lessons he grows from or reasons for his firing will be determined in the next several weeks.
The Ugly
Then there was the defense. Some drives were OK. Jacksonville’s receivers and running backs are legit and the Carolina defense showed up and shut them down on three drives. Unfortunately, Jacksonville had six other scoring drives on the day. We knew the defensive talent wasn’t there yet, but yesterday was a level below what we were all hoping for.
Bobby Brown III and Derrick Brown starting in each other’s positions—and remaining there for most of the game—was baffling. Our linebackers and safeties being too slow to react or just plain too slow after fans, as simple outside observers, had been worried about those exact shortcomings all offseason added insult to the injury of watching them play.
I’m coming around to an argument for having patience with the offense, but I truly don’t have one for this side of the ball. It was ugly in almost every sense of the word.
The Good
I considered simply writing “Tetairoa McMillan” and walking away. The kid is legit and, big ‘if’, if Young can dial in to being the same quarterback he was to end last season then he’s looking like he’s capable of being the kind of one man show on offense that the Panthers haven’t seen since Steve Smith. His concentration while catching the ball is something I have never seen from a player before. It’s magnetic to watch.
He’s the only player on the Panthers right now that I’m actually excited to see next Sunday.
What’s Next?
The theme of most of the individual mistakes yesterday was that they reeked of a lack of focus or preparation. That’s a coaching issue. I soured on Ron Rivera and Matt Rhule a year or so before team owner David Tepper actually fired them and I’m not there with Canales. Not yet. Rivera always had his guys ready to play, he just asked them to play in a strategically unsound way. Rhule was sloppy at every level. Canales has the strategy down. He’s missing the preparation.
It’s a big job for a coach new to this level of leadership and he was always going to make mistakes in it. I’m warming to the idea that his biggest mistake to date was not playing his starters more in the preseason. It would have given them the opportunity to identify and dial in Corbett’s snap issues. Legette could have remembered he had feet. Young could have shaken off the rust. Every player could have ironed out some of their “back to football” mistakes with reps that didn’t affect the standings in the regular season.
If, and I stress again how big an ‘if’ this is right now, all of these things were just a lack of preparedness then we should see progress in relatively short order. Next week should be better and Week 3 even better still. This isn’t the final years of Rivera or the entirety of Rhule’s tenure where I’m arguing that all of the pieces for a fun offense are on the table and we just need to wait for a competent coach to step in and take full advantage of D.J. Moore, Curtis Samuel, and Christian McCaffrey’s speed. Our timeline is now.
