Monday Morning Optimist: Hope is a fragile thing

Who are the real Carolina Panthers

The Carolina Panthers put up a stinker of an effort yesterday against the Dallas Cowboys. Aside from one long touchdown pass from Bryce Young to Jalen Coker, there wasn’t much positive to write home about after the game. So I’m not really going to try today.

I won’t spin smoke at any of your orifices and, in exchange, I humbly ask that we keep the sky-is-fallings to a dull a roar for the next week. Yesterday’s game was reminiscent of Bad Bryce, the quarterback we all hoped we would never see again. The team as a whole looked like any of the teams of the past three seasons in the game or two before their head coach was fired. It was, to be blunt, in perfect Carolina tradition just in time for the holidays.

The biggest reason that hurt was because the team was on a five game upswing. Two wins and three tight losses to true playoff caliber teams had most fans wearing rose colored glasses about the trajectory that the Panthers are currently on under new head coach Dave Canales.

It is easy, perhaps, to forget that progress in the NFL is rarely a strictly linear progression from bad to better. We need only review the Matt Rhule era or the Frank Reich episode to remind ourselves of that bitter truth.

The Panthers didn’t play the Chiefs and the Eagles closely by accident. They are capable of those efforts. They also didn’t play so poorly against the Cowboys that fans were probably trying to doordash paper bags to the stadium as a fluke. They are also certainly still capable of those efforts.

This is simply another week where we all have to take a breath and see what happens next. The Panthers have three weeks left to play in the 2024 season. That’s a lot of time to make or break fortunes on film heading into the off season. I think I still like Canales’ efforts as a head coach. I might still be optimistic about Young’s potential as a quarterback. I’m not convinced and I won’t be by one game.

This team is at the very beginning of what is going to be a multi-year rebuild to overcome some of the worst management and worst drafting it has known in its history. Rushing to judgment is only going to leave us breathless in the middle of a highly inconsequential sentence.

It may not sound like optimism, but hope has to be measured to outlast shit shows like that. In the meantime, enjoy the Next Gen dots on one of the most fun plays we have seen as Panthers fans in years: