Confidence go up. Confidence go down. This is the way of the Carolina Panthers and their fans. This season has been marked by remarkable highs and baffling lows, all tied together with the dueling beliefs
that this team should be better and that this team is still in the middle of rebuilding.
We have learned things this season. Ejiro Evero’s defense plays best with a lead and with expectations. Bryce Young has no rhyme or reason behind when he excels and when he plays below the level of his opponent. Dave Canales is struggling with short yardage playcalls. These things are fairly well established at the moment. What is unclear is why any of those prior statements are true and how, exactly, they are related.
That confusion, bred by a stunningly predictable lack of consistency, has led to this season’s Reacts surveys reading like a heart monitor. The steady up and down is the pulse of the season and the patient being monitored is not well.
What happens today will help shape the final few beats of this season and create the tail end of what is already promising to be a hilarious graph for us to argue over this offseason.
