The Philadelphia Eagles put an emphatic cap on the 2024 season with their revenge-fueled Super Bowl victory last night. It will be ten years this season since Panthers fans were able to watch their own team sniff that level of success. Neither team playing last night is a clear analog for the current state of the Panthers, but there are lessons to be learned from how each team got to the big game this year.
The Chiefs are the model of the modern, pass happy NFL offense built around a superlative quarterback. Make all the jokes you want about Patrick Mahomes’ performance last night—and there are plenty to be made—but the guy has now lost as many Super Bowls in the last six years as the Carolina Panthers have in franchise history. Last night simply demonstrates the perils of this model. An off night, an excellent defensive game plan, anything that negates your advantage at quarterback quickly neuters your team.
The Eagles, meanwhile, have built a deep team with superlative and less expensive talent at multiple positions. That includes the deep and talented defense led by a brilliant defensive coaching mind that won Philadelphia’s second Super Bowl title last night. It’s not that Jalen Hurts is a bad quarterback, he’s just not currently playing at a level that is going to sniff the league’s MVP conversation.
Last night was one of his best efforts of the season and it reminded me of Bryce Young playing the Chiefs. They’re different quarterbacks, but they both stared down Chief’s defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo’s best efforts and then continued to do whatever they wanted on the field.
I couldn’t help but wonder if the Panthers would have beaten the Chiefs—or even the Eagles for that matter—this season if the team’s defense had been a little healthier or a little deeper.
Young is currently looking like one of the most talented players on a very shallow roster. That puts the Panthers closer to the one-dimensional model of the Chiefs than they’d probably like. The Carolina defense needs a strong and, likely, multi-year investment in the defense to get themselves into the “defense wins championships” conversation. But still, they can’t go so far as to jump into the 2011-2018 Carolina Panthers model of “trust the quarterback to be an island and throw the kitchen sink at the defense.” That clearly worked out so well in its time.
The solution that Eagles showed us is as obvious as it is difficult to achieve: balance and strength on both sides of the ball. Hurts, as a quarterback, has help from his offensive skill players and he can trust his defense. It’s the balance that the Baltimore Ravens, the Detroit Lions, and the Buffalo Bills have all managed to strike. Good quarterbacks, some great, placed on good teams. It isn’t a guarantee of success, but it raises your team’s odds.
At 5-11, the Panthers were the three kids wearing a trench coat version of that team model in 2024. There is some combination of talent on the roster and promise in the coaching staff. With a quarterback in place the questions around the team become more granular and varied. It’s no longer the “no where to go but up” scenario that Scott Fitterer, Matt Rhule, and Frank Reich left us in.
We shouldn’t forget that just one or two season ago, those three kids couldn’t put on a trench coat together. They were struggling to prove that they could roll over and not suffocate in the mud that mired them. But this is the NFL, that’s impressive but that was also then. We’re looking to the future and what the team can do next.
The future of this franchise, appropriately enough for the offseason, now rests on the shoulders of general manager Dan Morgan. He had a decent 2024 draft. 2025 starts now and he has to level up his performance from last year if the Panthers are going to make a leap to meet the real competition in this league. That’s the main effort that stands between those three kids standing in a trench coat and working together as a team of adults.