Optimism is riding quite a high for a team with a limited history of recent success
2024 started as a sad time to be a Panthers fan. Team owner David Tepper had exercised his notoriously itchy trigger finger to fire the much hyped Frank Reich in his first season as head coach. It wasn’t that there weren’t reasons to get excited about Dave Canales as the new—and largely inexperienced—head coach, it was more that there was no track record of success from Tepper in making top level hiring decisions for the Carolina Panthers. In short, the team had been so middling to bad for so long that fans needed to see results before any of us got our hopes up again.
We all know how last season started and we all know how last season ended. Bryce Young’s remarkable on field turn around under the guidance of Canales ignited a cautious spark of optimism. At the end of the season, 85% of fans were confident in the direction their favorite franchise was heading in. By May, after we watched Dan Morgan navigate free agency and the draft, that number had increased to 93% of fans.
That may seem like more than cautious optimism, but we were also predicting the team to take a modest step forward from five wins in 2024 towards seven to nine wins in the coming 2025 season.
Instead of simply asking again how confident we all are in the direction in which Morgan and Canales are moving the Panthers, this week I decided to shake it up and see how many of you felt like you were more confident in the Panthers today than you were the day after Young torched the Atlanta Falcons for five touchdowns en route to a 44-38 win in the season finale.
An incredible 97% of y’all seem to like the moves the Panthers have made this offseason. Whether that was the focus on defensive talent in free agency or picking up Tetairoa McMillan in the draft as a new weapon for Young, something has ratcheted up the hype for the season to come.
Scroll on down to the comments and let us know your favorite addition to the team this offseason or give us your revised wins prediction. And for those of y’all tired of talking about all of this with no new information, don’t worry. Training camp starts Monday. We’ll finally get to see all of these new additions working together in pads soon.
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