The smell of football is in the air, and it’s time to overreact to all the stories we get out of camp.
It’s late July. Players are making their arrivals for the unofficial start of the new football season. It’s training camp time. Rookies report for the Carolina Panthers today and the veterans will join them on Tuesday. We’re going to get inundated with Tweets and stories about everything that happens, and we’re going to struggle with our reactions because every success on one side means a failure for the opposite side of the ball. None of it is going to matter in about a month, but it will mean everything for now because it is all we have.
The Panthers have had somewhat of a transformative offseason, which begets more interesting stories when training camp begins. There are players to watch and positional battles to monitor as we prepare for the preseason in just a couple of weeks. Here are some big stories to brace yourself for.
Bryce Young’s continued development
Young turned into a different quarterback down the stretch of last season and enters this season as a candidate to be pretty good. The coverage of Young has taken an optimistic turn, and I fully expect to get a healthy dose of coverage surrounding his growth as a leader. We saw that some during OTAs, and that’s only going to get ratcheted up in training camp. That’s going to get complemented with a good bit of conversation about how well he’s actually throwing the ball too.
The wide receiver depth chart
The Panthers added a lot of talent to their wide receiver room over the last two offseasons, and now it almost feels like a surplus of good players. Tetairoa McMillan should be the team’s number one option sooner rather than later given his talent level, but there’s a lot of moving parts here. McMillan, Xavier Legette, Adam Thielen, and Jalen Coker all have legitimate cases to be starting wide receivers, and then you have the Hunter Renfrow comeback behind them. It also wouldn’t be an offseason without an unheralded wide receiver stealing the show, and this year’s version of that is Jimmy Horn Jr., who is apparently pushing to get his own looks with the offense. It looks like a really deep group on paper and is going to get a lot of coverage, as receivers often do.
Rookie edge rushers making an impact
The Panthers double dipped at edge rusher in the 2025 NFL Draft, using a second round pick on Nic Scourton and a third on Princely Umanmielen. They let Jadeveon Clowney walk in part to open up playing time for the duo, so the team clearly expects them to be ready pretty quickly. The Panthers have a pretty good offensive line, so it might be hard for the rookies to make inroads early, but any success is going to create some buzz for a team that’s been desperate for pass rush productivity for a few years now.
The Panthers need a kicker
The Panthers elected to let Eddy Pineiro walk despite him being mostly accurate presumably because of distance issues and some inopportune misses. The current training camp battle is between veteran journeyman Matthew Wright and undrafted free agent Ryan Fitzgerald. The latter was widely regarded as one of the top kickers in this class, so he’s the guy most people want and expect to win the job. Get ready for lots of Tweets charting makes and misses for both kickers in the coming weeks.