After a quiet holiday weekend of trading away quarterback Bryce Young’s favorite target and then losing his arguably next favorite target, second-year wide receiver Jalen Coker, to a quad injury for 4-6 weeks, the Carolina Panthers are faced with the first week of the 2025 season. It has been a long offseason of hope, questions, and no football. That has been quickly followed by a short run of weird injuries raising new questions for the team’s season opener this Sunday against the Jacksonville Jaguars.
We’ve joked all offseason about the confluence of the 2024 Ohio State National Championship, Jennifer Lopez’s divorce, and opening the season against the Jags meaning that we’re going to the Super Bowl this year. This may look like superstitious, even spurious, reasoning, that is all in good fun, but it has had staying power across the internet for two good reasons: they connect our present as a fanbase to better times. It has been ten years since the 15-1 2015 Carolina Panthers were at the peak of football and every year since then has been a step or a head-over-heels tumble down that mountain. Fun has been hard to find in Panthers football and being a fan of a football team should, occasionally, be fun. Connecting to the better years both reinforces the positive feeling of community that has stagnated in recent years and feels fun.
Last season, by the numbers, was a standard, disappointingly noncompetitive year for the Carolina Panthers. Their 5-12 record was their fourth five-win season in just the past six years. We were able to end the season on a high note watching the best quarterback play the Panthers have seen since before Cam Newton’s shoulder injury. But that play did not result in a winning streak to end the season thanks to Carolina’s historically bad defense. Taking one step forward and one step back has left the Panthers in an unpredictable spot.
If the defense steps up and Young maintains or elevates his level of play from last season then they’re in business. If Young takes a step back then we’re probably in the market for a new head coach and quarterback by Week 10. If the defense is no better than last season then we might walk out of the 2025 season in the exact same position we entered it: knowing nothing for certain. If. If. If. Then what do we, as fans, do now?
That’s not a question that we should answer based on things that have actually happened recently.
Superstitions are important in a sport that is increasingly overtaken by analytics. Sure, analyzing data can reflect the history of the game in a way that provides actionable insights into its future, but that has a bigger place in the team’s meeting rooms than in fan forums. We’re not making decisions for the team right now. We’re standing on the eve of a season that looks blessed by history and cursed by the present. We’re trying to sort out how we’re supposed to feel about it all. I can make a solid argument for why Jaycee Horn’s single car accident induced thumb injury or Ikem Ekwonu’s appendectomy are going to have a bigger impact on the Panthers’ tone-setting season opener in just five days than J-Lo’s divorce that was finalized in January. But I don’t want to because that’s not fun.
Superstitions are a deeply human behavior that date back to a time when we had no better heuristics with which to interpret the world. I know today that there is no way that passing gas has any affect on the weather just like I know that Ohio State’s 2024 season has no direct bearing on the Panthers 2025 season. But you better believe that one unlucky caveman had some strange beliefs after a stormy night and some bad beans. Just like more than one person out there has built their hope on this season in no small part to the coincidences between this season and the Panthers’ few glory days.
Maybe we live in a world where coincidence is enough to build a joke and a joke is enough to inspire the actual confidence needed to affect reality. Maybe our unlucky caveman was scared every time he ate beans or maybe he walked with false confidence, believing himself unusually powerful.
The impossible question that Panthers fans are grappling with right now is what matters more: Young’s ability to elevate this team, if he indeed has that ability, or the Panthers piling up of small injuries and the lingering foul taste of their 2024 defense. We’ve been waiting to answer some form of that question since the 2024 season ended on January 5th and it has only gotten more complicated since. It’s a question that is impossible and looms larger everyday because we can’t even start to answer it until we see them play real football on Sunday. It’s almost here and now we also have to ask ourselves if we want to know the answer. What if, after all, the answer is just “another 5-12 team”?
For the next five days, and maybe for the rest of the season, I’d like to believe that my favorite team is unusually powerful and that, whatever their diet has been this offseason, they’ll hit the league like the storms we saw from them in 2003 and 2015. I know that isn’t likely. I know the answer to the big question of the offseason—who are the Carolina Panthers?—will be answered with more of a shrug than a statement. But that shrug is never fun. Taking the otherside of the superstitious coin and looking at Horn, Icky, and Coker’s last couple of weeks as harbingers of what’s to come is also no fun. Connecting with the great years of our fandom’s past is. So right now I’m going to believe in what I can’t see, because—for only five more days—there’s nothing real that I can see to contradict that belief.
Whether the Panthers are blessed, cursed. or live in a causal reality, it makes no difference in the end. Football is here. Super Bowl or bust.
