It’s the obvious choice
Carolina Panthers fans are entering their team’s bye week on the crest of an unfamiliar wave: a winning streak. This is the team’s first winning streak since Week 3 of the 2021 season. To put that in context, that was five head coaches ago and Sam Darnold was the starting quarterback.
With three wins before the bye week, the Panthers are also on track to surpass their 2023 win total by yesterday. They have won no more than seven games since 2017. They could pass their win total for every season coached fully or partially by Matt Rhule, Steve Wilks, Frank Reich, or Chris Tabor by winning just five of their remaining seven games.
What’s that? You think that is a tall order when the Panthers have only beaten teams with combined 7-22 record, all of whom are expected to fire their head coaches by the end of the season, and have left on their schedule the Kansas City Chiefs, the Philadelphia Eagles, the Atlanta Falcons, and the Arizona Cardinals, all teams above .500 with a combined record of 26-10?
I’m sorry.
I thought this was a column for optimists.
Jokes aside, let’s talk about what yesterday’s win means for the team. The Panthers are next big date on their calendar is not the playoffs, but the 2025 NFL Draft. Wins like yesterday cost them draft position in a draft without top tier quarterback talent. That’s OK. The reality is that the Panthers are still vying for a top ten pick. That’s great for their roster, but where in the top ten doesn’t matter nearly as much as Dave Canales putting his stamp on this locker room and building a culture for that future top ten pick to walk into.
It’s too early yet to say that the Panthers won’t be shopping for a quarterback in 2025 or 2026, but we can definitively say that Bryce Young is at least looking better. The team’s third down efficiency was horrendous and a direct contributor to a nail-biter overtime finish against a bad Giants team that had little to no interest in being there. But it was a result largely of poor play calling, dropped balls, and occasional bad quarterbacking. That’s a huge improvement from horrible third down efficiencies in the past that were simply the result of Young being unwilling to throw past the line of scrimmage.
Instead, Young completed multiple balls at intermediate distances and had several other accurate throws dropped by rookie wide receivers. Young looked more comfortable and confident than he did in last week’s win against the New Orleans Saints. That counts as progress. It still wasn’t a good game, but it was a step forward for a young quarterback who has the rest of the season to audition for his 2025 team.
Again, better doesn’t necessarily mean good. If he can continue to progress then he could get to a place where he is playing good football by the end of the season. If he stays at the level he showed yesterday then the Panthers likely won’t win another game.
And that brings us back to jokes and, more specifically, to the title of this article. We should move the Panthers to Munich. There is something in the water there, or the beer, that gave immeasurable luck to the Panthers in the face of their concerted efforts to lose a game to a team that was trying harder to do the same. That’s a magic that you can’t just buy and sprinkle onto the artificial turf at home. If the luck is in Munich then that is where the Panthers should be.
That’s two whole jokes, and not even one funny one, in an article analyzing a win by a formerly 2-7 team against a now 2-8 team. I’ll close by calling attention to that because I think it is important. Young didn’t play particularly well. The defense barely contained one of the least explosive offenses in the NFL. And yet somehow it was still an entertaining game from start to finish. Somehow, and not just because the score was close the whole game, the team felt watchable. That’s the true magic of yesterday’s game, win or lose, and that’s a magic that we haven’t felt from a team with a full-time head coach since somewhere in the middle of Ron Rivera’s tenure. We should all be optimistic about what comes next.