Cat Scratch Reader
There is no sugar coating how much yesterday’s 26-10 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars sucked. The Carolina Panthers have been going downhill for about the past eight years and a season opening stinker is all too familiar. The defense looking lost on the field is too familiar. Bryce Young struggling in a season opener? Yup, we’ve seen that a few too many times. It’s the familiarity of this kind of bad, the frequency with which we’ve seen it, that hurts the most. It took all that optimism we had coming into the season and soured it with a nauseating quickness. That said, I’m not ready to burn everything down yet. There were some differences to yesterday’s dysfunction that give me hope.
Hot take, I don’t think Bryce Young was a awful yesterday. He had some bad throws, some bad decisions, and some bad luck. He needs to learn to live for the next set of downs and to slide, certainly. He isn’t Cam Newton and he’s trying to play like him sometimes. He also had some good throws that were dropped or carried inexplicably out of bounds.
People had their pitchforks out in the open threads for Bryce Young after his first incompletion. His first interception raised the temperature of those forks dramatically. Yes, he did make mistakes. No, he wasn’t as bad as the hapless, disaffected shell of a player he was when he opened the 2024 season. He also wasn’t the smooth operator who led the Panthers down the homestretch of the 2025 season. He fell somewhere in the middle.
There’s room for optimism there if you want it, but it is far from a free pass for Young. He needs to show he can step up without being benched for five weeks. It would also be an indictment of him as a player if he were the only player making costly errors. Alas, this was a team effort.
Xavier Legette was so focused on his hands for most of the game that he never gave a thought for his feet. Austin Corbett ruined at least three drives with bad snaps that threw off a play’s timing in a heavily timing based offense. Ja’Tavion Sanders dropped a beautiful ball down the seam. Yosh Nijman is no Ikem Ekwonu.
Some of these mistakes and more might be indications of players not being starter quality. A lot of them reek of them being unprepared. The argument that the starters should have had more time playing in the preseason is gaining weight, as the inconsistency and lack of cohesion from the team falls back at the feet of Dave Canales. He may be a good offensive coordinator, but he is still taking some lumps as a head coach. Whether or not those become lessons he grows from or reasons for his firing will be determined in the next several weeks.
Then there was the defense. Some drives were OK. Jacksonville’s receivers and running backs are...
