Tempered reason from fans of the Carolina Panthers?!
Fans of the Carolina Panthers are showing remarkable restraint and understanding in predicting their favorite team’s successes in the 2025 season. A widely lauded draft and a popular head coach would have some fans foaming at the mouth while forecasting an undefeated season and multiple Super Bowl titles. Setting aside the logistical difficulties of playing more than one Super Bowl in a calendar year is the level of reasoning you would normally expect to find at this point in the off season. Instead, y’all are out here acting like the Panthers have to exist with the realities of their roster and with a history—that is fast becoming a legacy—of falling short of expectations. I’m proud of all of us, to be honest.
Seven to nine wins would put the Panthers a modest step ahead of their 2024 season as a whole. There were flashes down the stretch of a much stronger team, but additions to the offense and defense this off season are as much hopeful thinking as they are concrete improvements. It’s May and we haven’t even seen any of the rookies in pads yet. Modesty is wisdom at this point.
Seven to nine wins, as a prediction, suggests that fans think the Panthers have an outside shot at their first winning season since 2017. For context for those of y’all who don’t know how to measure time back through the COVID-19 pandemic, 2017 was Christian McCaffrey’s rookie season.
Seven wins alone would match the Panthers high water mark in recent years. They have matched that mark twice in the last seven seasons. Once in Ron Rivera’s last full season as head coach and once the season that Matt Rhule was fired after starting 1-4.
We have obviously learned our lesson that you can’t hire Jay-Z to build Rome in seven days or whatever the heck it was that Rhule was trying to accomplish here. We all know that there is plenty of room for Dave Canales to faceplant the Panthers to a 1-16 record in his second season as head coach, just as the team eclipsing the 2015 Panthers’ record is technically a possibility. The reality is likely simpler and it is excellent to see most of us acknowledge that the Panthers are likely to be just a little bit better this season.