Every team gets at least one standalone game. We try to guess which one the Panthers get.
Every NFL team gets at least one standalone game each year. That had generally been associated with every team getting a primetime game, but the NFL bucked that trend by not giving one particular team any night games. That team—the Carolina Panthers. Their lone standalone game was an early morning battle with the hapless Giants.
The NFL schedule gets released in full on Wednesday night. We already know all of match-ups that’ll take place during the season, but now we get the dates and times and networks for those games. They’re truly riveting bits of information that are totally worth the entire week’s worth of coverage the NFL and their partners devote to it. And we’re going to contribute.
While the Panthers still weren’t good last season, they finished the season strong. That finish and a well managed offseason have generated a little bit of buzz around Carolina, especially relative to how unwatchable they were in 2023 and unexciting they were going into 2024.
I looked at last year’s distribution of primetime games to try to get a feel for how the NFL tends to divvy them up. Unsurprisingly, teams coming off strong seasons or with compelling stories dominate the nighttime game schedule, but the less heralded teams will get a bone or two thrown their way. The Panthers are in a cluster of teams at +10000 to win the Super Bowl, putting them in a tier that is a bit above the NFL’s cellar dwellers. There seems to be some excitement about the emergence of Bryce Young down the stretch last season. With all that said, I think the Panthers will get two primetime games in 2025.
Now for the opponents. One of them will probably be a divisional game since the NFL likes to spice up a meeting between less marketable teams by making sure there’s a rivalry component to it. Last season’s finale between the Panthers and Falcons was an electric factory as the Panthers quashed any hope the Falcons had to make the playoffs. A rematch of that showdown seems like a natural fit for a Thursday night game in the middle of the season.
The Panthers don’t have a great slate of opponents to pick from for a second featured game. A meeting between Young and CJ Stroud or Caleb Williams would be a good draw, but the Panthers don’t play either of those teams this season. Matchups with Trevor Lawrence or Drake Maye would feature a similar storyline, but that’s a lot of bad team to put into one standalone game. However, you could slide one of those games in as a Monday Night game when they have the overlapping windows early in the season. We will go Panthers vs Patriots in a rematch of Super Bowl XXXVIII as one of the Monday Night doubleheaders.
This will probably all be terribly wrong when the schedule actually comes out. But maybe it won’t be.