What can we learn from the Panthers draft grades?

2025 NFL Draft - Round 1 — Photo by Perry Knotts/Getty Images

Outlets are up and down on Carolina’s weekend decisions

Grades are always all the rage as fans, analysts, and even teams alike are trying to make sense of the mayhem that is the NFL Draft. From the perspective, 2025 is no different. From the perspective of the fans of the Carolina Panthers, however? This feels like a very new year.

Fans graded almost every pick, locally, as a positive contribution to the team. Not every pick was a runaway A+, but several were. Even when people didn’t love a player they often commented on appreciating the value of the pick or the decision-making behind it. Vanishingly rare were the conversations about reaches, busts, or bad trades. Simply put, Panthers fans were happy with what they saw last weekend.

That’s a rare sentence to write in recent years. It is also rare to see the national media at large happy with what the Panthers have done and even rarer still to see them in general agreement with the more vocal commenters we host here at Cat Scratch Reader. Let’s see how close we got this year to those rare sightings.

Grades from around the web:

What can we learn from these grades?

A lot of folks seem genuinely happy with the patience and talent evaluation that built this year’s draft class for the Carolina Panthers. Unbelievably, much of the national media seems to be on the same page as Panthers fans. The Athletic had the Panthers with the 10th best draft in the league, the Ringer had them ranked second overall.

Obviously, it is way to early to actually tell if any—let alone all—of these picks are going to be home runs for the Panthers, but the optimism is telling. It is also grounded by the two lower grades that I aggregated here. Prisco and Kiper, specifically said two things that buoyed my trust in this draft.

Kiper, first and foremost, gets locked into his guys and judges harshly those that do not agree with him. It’s why, every year by about the third round, there will be two or three names on “Kiper’s Best Available” list in the corner of your screen (if you’re watching ESPN for the draft) that stack up and don’t get called. From a broadcast perspective, it limits the amount of useful information on the screen and keeps some kids from the getting their names on television. I don’t love it. It also keeps Kiper talking about guys who are not particularly relevant to the live event he is supposed to be covering. We all know what happened this year in that regard.

That monomaniacal focus affects the value of his analysis. His grade for the Panthers draft class reads like he was personally offended, not professionally disappointed, that the team took Tetairoa McMillan over Jalon Walker at eighth overall. The rest of his write-up sounds approving and gives little justification for the middling overall grade. I like that. I’d be more wary if he had simply adored every pick the Panthers made.

Prisco, meanwhile, had a much simpler reason for docking the Panthers a few points and an explanation that I found more encouraging than worrying. First, he’s not sold on Princely Umanmielen. That’s fine. Different evaluators have different opinions all the time. Second, let’s look to his exact words:

The two pass rushers in Nic Scourton (second) and Umanmielen have talent, but they didn’t always play to it.
– Pete Prisco, CBSsports.com

I read that as Scourton and Umanmielen are both more talented than their draft position implies. Talent held back by coaching often doesn’t equate to eye-popping production. If the Panthers are able to coach to their talent then these two guys could prove to have been the steals of the 2025 NFL Draft. Improbable? Maybe, but it’s almost May. We’ve got nothing but time to dream and argue right now.