Cat Scratch Reader
The Carolina Panthers are in first place in the NFC South entering Week 17 of the 2025 NFL season. They can clinch the division with a win this week and a Tampa Bay Buccaneers loss. They cannot be eliminated from the playoffs until Week 18 at the earliest. Week 18 is also known as the last week of the season. I don’t care if head coach Dave Canales is still learning how to play into his team’s strengths in short yardage and goal line situations. I don’t care if Bryce Young is determined in January to not be the future of the Panthers franchise. I really don’t care if any fans, myself included, have set-in-stone opinions about any of the leaders or high profile members of the Carolina Panthers. Nothing matters about this franchise right now past the fact that they are in contention.
It has been too long since that has been the case. It has been too long since the result of a Panthers game has had consequences that echoed longer than it took to turn off the TV. We are watching a young team suffer through growing pains and still exceed the best efforts of any iteration of the Carolina Panthers in the past seven years.
Their eight wins so far exceed the best win total of any Panthers team since their 11-5 wildcard team in 2017. They are one win away from the first winning record since that season. They are two wins away from a ten win season.
It doesn’t matter if they lose out from here. Being in the neighborhood is better than we were expecting when we were optimistic in the offseason. It is unrecognizable compared to what we were expecting after the Panthers started 0-2. Their current record and position matches nothing of what any of us would have expected if we told our past selves that the Panthers were going to get swept by the Saints this season.
This team is silly. This team is inconsistent. The growing pains metaphor is particularly apt because they play like toddlers. They’ll surprise you with their perception, their inquisitiveness, and their ability to find themselves in cabinets that were supposed to be locked. They may not win the 5k they somehow got onto the road for, but right now they are charming everybody who catches sight of them running backwards on the road wearing their pants on their heads.
We were always rooting for the Panthers to learn how to put their pants on their legs next season. This was billed as a three year rebuild and that was if Young panned out. The jury is still out on him and the team is knocking on the door of the playoffs, punting talk of the 2026 draft to February—where it belongs—and giving life to a home crowd that was anywhere else for the holidays in recent years. If that’s not worth smiling about today then I’m not sure why any of us are here.
